A Week Four Paper
PHL/443
December, 16th, 2013

A Week Four Paper

The questions posed this week were very interesting, assigning rights to machines and determining criteria’s if machines are conscious or thinking. Assigning rights to humans is one thing and even that has been debatable for hundreds of years, but now the conversation has transitions if we could how would we give machines rights. I think that anything that has rights needs to be able to think for themselves, to form opinions, and be active contributors in their rights. Machines are not thinking or capable of having or experiencing conscious experiences, which I feel, would allow them to have rights. Rights are a form of freedom and how do we give freedom to an object that we program, we give information to, and we can turn on and off at will. If and when the reality of The Jetson’s comes to life and I have a robotic maid that actively interacts dependently with my family and I throughout the day then I would have to consider transferring rights to him or her.

As every other week in this course, week four has been very informative and mind bending for me specially the discussion questions with regards to the rights of intelligent machines, I believe for one to have rights one must be conscious and poses free will, and if in future intelligent machines become conscious then they do not need rights but regulating. The other topic which I found interesting was “what type of criteria may be established for determining if a machine is conscious or thinking?” I believed that consciousness is subjective and it begins when a the subject wakes and ends when that subject sleeps, die, fall in a coma or otherwise becomes unconscious, so for a machine to be conscious then it has to become self aware and poses free will, something that isn’t possible at this moment. I love Philosophy and my only short