Okay. Let's follow that through:

1) Plants survive on their own and in groups. Therefore, plants have the right to live. (Don't step on the grass!)

2) Bacteria survive on their own and in groups. Therefore, bacteria have the right to live and should not be eradicated. (Sorry, hand sanitizer.)

3) Cows survive on their own and in groups. Therefore, cows have the right to live and should not be slaughtered. (So much for that steak last night.)

So yes, under this thesis, AI & robots have a right to live, regardless of their threat or benefit to society and humans.

no no, that was not what i was saying. if you kill a cow it is dead and therfore not survived.

If I kill you, you are dead and therefore have not survived. Does that mean you lack a right to life?

Perhaps this is an argument in favor of some sort of perverted natural selection, where you have a right to life commensurate with your ability to defend it?

something like that, anyway im not saying that i know the future of machine and know it would survive. and therfore i don't know if it has right to live. saying that something doesn't have right to live is not same as being able to kill it or shut it down.

i mean if some machine is not usefull for nothing and it wastes resources than you have right to shut it down if you can, no matter what IQ it has.

if you kill me yes i don't have right to live.

So "right to live" = "ability to survive"?

I don't think so. That my friend, is the only thing that separates us from pure animals (i.e., morality).

(I do not wish to open the can of worms of consciousness, soul, etc., and etc., so, HN, please refrain.)

it is important to mention "ability to survive by its own or in group" to be politically correct, for example little babies usually cant survive on its own but can survive in a group. so they usually have right to live. morality is just another way of saying i care for this baby so i form a group with this baby.

Well, we certainly don't do that with animals. Only after a certain threshold of intelligence we don't want to hurt/eat them, or if they are "wild life", which we generally want to preserve, although it's only in recent history that this has happened.

If aliens existed, and came here, I wonder if they would treat us the same depending on whether they are only 2x, 10x or 1000x more intelligent than we are. Of course it's also possible that the more intelligent they get, the more they will want to preserve any kind of life, and will try to get their resources from something else to survive.

It should get interesting if we ever develop human brain-like artificial intelligence, and then we amplify it by 1000x following Moore's law for a couple of decades. Kill switches would become useless. We'd just have to teach them to value life more than anything, before it's too late.

Robotics rule #1: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics#.22The_...)

Also see this discussion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethics_of_artificial_intellige...

I don't remember now, but I think I heard that law is flawed, and could be easily bypassed, even when used together with the other 2.

Does anyone know how that law is flawed? Unless I'm remembering it wrong.

In 2003 there were 6 million car accidents, not to mention people falling over, wars, etc. You're mandating the robot to put everyone in a padded cell for their own good.

Here's the paradox: a human tells a robot to kill another human; at that point, law #2 is in direct opposition to law #1.

But why would it be? If you give it the first law, then that command should be "disabled" for anyone from outside. You could try to tell a robot that, but it shouldn't work. Your best chance should be if you try to trick the robot into doing a certain action that would indirectly get that person dead. but if he's smart enough to know how to protect a human life, he should be smart enough to deny you the command, knowing it will endanger that other person's life.

Law #2 makes mention of law #1:

A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

Does malaria have a right to live? Are we wrong to try to eradicate it?

Until we become intelligent enough to get our resources without hurting any other species on the planet, we'll keep defending our "own right" to life against anything else, and just try to minimize the casualties on the other "side".

Until we manage that, as the supreme species on the planet, we will get to arbitrarily decide what gets to live and what doesn't. All the other life forms are at our mercy. At least most of them aren't even aware of it.

well it is hard to tell without predicting the long term future. I mean if we eradicate all malaria something else may also happen as a consecuence that we were not aware now but is bad for us.

That's a rather different standard of right and wrong than you seem to support in your previous post.