Prioritizing Robots Over Humans

One of the readings that stopped me and made me think more about the dignity of humanity was the article “HUMAN RIGHTS VS. ROBOT RIGHTS: Forecasts from Japan”. Simply this article displays how automata is overtaking basic human rights in our today’s modern world, and that governments and institutions started issuing protective laws to ensure the safety of these robots. Taking the Japanese case for instance, the government accepted giving the citizenship for a robot ,however, foreigners who spent most of their lives working and building up an efficient Japanese economy were not granted this privilege and they are not allowed to have it by “law”. Such case draws anyone’s attention and makes us look thoroughly about the situation we are placed in, are our rights really coming to an end? Are we over developing automata to the extent that we overlooked the future of humanity? All these questions need to be answered before a drastic wake up call occurs.

I think that if we kept excelling in robotic technology with such pace neglecting the consequences, one day human beings will categorize such actions as discrimination between humans and robots and this will structure our society in a new unusual way, and since robotic costs are considered to be much less and more efficient than humans in many aspects especially from an economic perspective, our rights will continue to diminish over time until robots will be more superior than us.

Finally, since humans are the source of emotions, robotic creators should take that into consideration and draw this virtual line between the importance of humans and the importance of robots before our species takes a unified stand against violating their rights and overlooking their effort in building a prosperous life in many countries.