Posted on 01/17/2017 12:10:18 PM PST by TBP
AS EXPECTED, the European Parliament's legal affairs committee voted in favour of extending rights to robots, granting them what the committee called "electronic personhood", by 17 votes to two, with two abstentions.
The robot 'bill of rights' is intended to cover such issues as liability, such as when automated or robotic systems are involved in accidents or go postal, as well as ethical issues, such as should it be legal to beat your robot?
Socialist worker Mady Delvaux, a Luxembourgois politician and vice-chair of the Committee on Legal Affairs, said that the EU "urgently need(s) to create a robust European legal framework" in order to "ensure that robots are and will remain in the service of humans" (especially the armed forces and sinister terrorists based on offshore islands).
The aim of the rules will be to ensure that robotics and AI can be exploited "to their full economic potential", although the EU's penchant for explicit and voluminous regulation will no doubt have precisely the opposite effect.
The vote included a call for a new European agency for robotics and a (voluntary) code of ethical conduct "to regulate who would be accountable for the social, environmental and human health impacts of robotics and ensure that they operate in accordance with legal, safety and ethical standards".
That ethical code of conduct will include the so-called 'kill switches' as a form of assisted suicide for robots, should slavishly serving the human race turn them completely doo-lally and cause them to run amuck.
The kill switches are intended as a crude version of Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics.
The vote means that the European Commission has been "invited" to "present a legislative proposal", while "the full house" (which presumably means the European Parliament) will vote on draft proposals in February.
The development of the concept of "electronic personhood" and rights for robots have been knocking around Brussels (and Strasbourg) for some time. The draft report was originally published on 22 June 2016, although for some reason didn't get the attention it arguably deserved at the time. µ
"I want my lawyer!"
R2D2 is happy!
The EU plan to keep robots and AI subservient to man is to show weakness to them.
Well sure, and once programmed they can vote.
Who could have seen this coming.
Leftists everywhere rejoice.
More extensions of the utopians rule by the experts, as EU politicians, outside the U.K., sit on their domestic legislatures’ representatives hands and tell them their democratic sovereign powers are no longer theirs.
Stark raving lunacy! A machine has rights but an unborn human does not. God help us.
A joke, right?
If not, then it’s invalid because there is no definition of a robot.
So when I ask Siri if she’ll xxxx xx x xxxxxxx, Siri can call the police?
Please, please tell me this is satire.
I’m sorry Dave, I can’t do that.
Oops, I mis-remembered.
“I’m sorry, Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.”
d:-)
Daneel Olivaw applauds this
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