Basically I think Momo would introduce your junk to her bokken for suggesting it'd be fine for humans to do such things. Them as people aren't hypothetical or abstract concepts, they're their own characters.
i'm not. i'm asking whether anthrocentric moral sensibilities are still relevant for life-forms which are so completely different from us by nature.
Edit for clarity: a better way of putting that is to say that i'm asking whether our sense of morality is too anthrocentric to be usefully applied when dealing with synthetic life.
Which is a fascinating question.
It's a question that could be sidestepped by asking them how they want to be treated.
The small beige box replied: “I would like to be granted civil rights. And a small glass of champagne, if you please."
The answer to "How do you want to be treated?" will -- gasp! -- vary from one individual to the next.
If they have any motivations at all they'll have the equivalent of a desire for self-preservation, just to ensure they're alive to fulfill whatever other goals they have.
in that case i'd like to be worshiped as an infallible and handsome god, if you please.
in (semi)seriousness though, 'civil rights' is an extremely broad term. and most of what we consider to be 'civil rights' are themselves built around our own anthropic desires and needs.
is the 'right to life' relevant to a organism with no need for self preservation? say, a robot built specifically for a task, which is now complete. or is the right to personal autonomy relevant to an organism which only wants to follow orders? and if following orders is an intrinsic 'psychological' need, then is it unethical not to give it any?
and then there's the dualistic hardware/software independence of the AIs, which has no apparent parallel among humans at all. marten might not own pintsize, but he
does own the shell that pintsize runs on, which he pays to power and maintain. does that ownership give him authority to choose the amount of RAM to be installed, or where it should be stored, or when to turn it on & off?