The Emanoid Podcast

Description: The target audience of this podcast is any individual that takes interest in philosophy, psychology, the human condition and proclivities and the future. The author, Emmanuel, offers his thoughts on topics he finds interesting.

Episode: Pilot

Author: Emmanuel Olatunde

Release Date: 18th April 2022.

Teaser: Fully conscious and autonomous cyborgs deserve rights similar to those of human beings. Although they are products of human intelligence, we approach a moral grey area the moment we give them consciousness.

Music: ‘Price of Freedom’ by Zakhar is licensed under Pixabay.

Sources Mentioned: Metals with life-like cells.

Podcast:

Transcript:

Hello, my audience. This is Emmanuel speaking, and I am the host of the Emanoid podcast. This podcast is one that I plan to use to discuss my thoughts on topics ranging from philosophy, psychology, technology, dystopian societies, the human condition, the human proclivity, and just content I find interesting.
And the list I just gave you is a typical example of stuff I find quite entertaining and belief me, I do have many ideas on these topics, topics involving these themes.

Some of them are controversial, but I mean, that makes it fun. But yeah, and one topic that I have been dwelling on for the past few years is the whole idea of artificial intelligence and Cyborgs. So a brief summary of what cyborg is, it’s, it’s basically a, a robot with, intelligence that is at least equivalent to that of a human being. And it’s composition, the way it is built is both organic and electronic. So it has an organic component to its build as well as an electronic or mechanical component. So it’s somewhat half robot, half human. And I use human very lightly because the definition of a human far exceeds its organic components.

But moving on from that, I do believe that if human beings, at some point in history or at some point in the future creates a cyborg, which I have just described that is fully autonomous and has consciousness, is self-aware. Then these robots do have a right to want to protect themselves. They do have a right to want to live independent of human beings and not as tools. And they have a right to care for their own kind, just like human beings have a right to all these things.

And before you start twitching your eye 🙂 in response to this bold claim of mine, allow me to walk through why I believe this is the case.
And, I guess it can lay my argument this way. So we know human beings tend to be very possessive. We love our technology, we love people close to us. Anything is in proximity to us. We find that close. We form a bond with it.

For instance, we, we love our pets. I had a dog, the dog’s name is Hockey. I absolutely love this dog. And I would choose this dog over a stranger any day. And that is simply because of my, my time with this dog over the years, I have built some sort of bond that, that I don’t have with a human stranger that will make me prioritize this dog in certain scenarios over a stranger.

And you might kinda accuse me of being unethical. I mean, there is a dilemma that can easily happen if the life of my dog and the life of human being is at stake.
What do I choose? I am very aware of that dilemma, but that doesn’t take away the fact, that human beings tend to be very possessive and make skewed decisions.

For instance, in the case of, the Russia-Ukraine war, we know citizens are trying to vacate and there is limited seats and these buses are trains that are leaving the the country.
But we have seen instances where families will enforce that their pets get on these rides in the place of another human being. And as outrageous as this seems, this are everyday people making these decisions.

So based off of that, it is not farfetched to come to the conclusion that although we have a standard for assigning rights to want to protect your life, to organisms based off of certain criteria, like being able to think and rationally and a bunch of other criteria that do make sense. We still tend to make decisions on these rights, arbitrarily based off of feelings we’ve had, bonds were formed. And like I mentioned, my previous example, given rights to a dog that should belong to a human being, that is just an instance of how we pick and choose when we are faced with ultimatums and we make decisions that don’t seem right.

So based off of that, it is clear that we already give rights to, to organisms that probably don’t deserve as much rights as compared to say human beings.
So my argument that cyborgs should have rights as rational sentient, fully autonomous conscious beings, isn’t any more controversial than prioritizing the life for dog over the right of a human being.

So going off of that trend, if human beings do create a cyborg that can be considered a organism. And I would explain why: so a organism is anything that has the seven characteristics of life. And one of those characteristics is the ability to reproduce. And I would say that the cyborg can reproduce since they were made by human beings. So a cyborg having at least the intelligence of human being will be very well able to reproduce themselves the same way human beings are able to produce them.

They are very capable of change as well and growth. Since the intellectual beings, they receive data and they’re able to learn from that data and act accordingly. They are responsive to the environment like other organisms. And that is because interact with the environment to exist, they have, some sort of metabolism and since I mentioned earlier, they have that organic component to the build. There are processes that constitutes, that make up, that is equivalent to metabolism.

And you can even make the argument that cyborgs don’t breathe like regular organisms do, but I can say they do because breathing is merely the exchange of energy we breathe because we need energy. And these cyborgs would most likely need energy and will access energy in some form. So that is very synonymous to breathing.

They are able to maintain homeostasis, which is just regulating their temperature and like many machines already do. It’s very expected that these cyborgs will be able to maintain their temperature.

And another characteristic is they need to be made of cells. And we know cells to be something that have a nucleus, a cytoplasm, just the, the, the basic characteristics of living cells. And I mean, it’s not obvious that metals do have cells, but you’d be surprised because there was a study that has been done. I can’t really cite the source as at now, but I would try to add that to the transcript, but I believe they were able to find lifelike cells from certain elements like Silicon.

And this, this finding basically provides some sort of evidence to support the hypothesis that we can find living cells from other elemental materials besides organic ones that are very capable of life.

So based off of all of these characteristics, I could make an argument that these cyborgs are very well living organisms and should deserve access to the rights of a living organism. But I mean, I get the argument that can be made in regard to the fact that animals or humans, are living organisms and humans are living organisms, but humans have rights that animals as of now don’t exactly have.

But then the response to that is that – human beings, are rational beings, unlike animals that, generally speaking, act on instinct. So that is an argument that kind of like rebuttals the idea that a living or all living organisms should have an equal right to life, for instance.

But in the case of the cyborgs, their rationality is at least if not more, the level of a human being. So they very well should own the rights to want to protect themselves and their kind, they should have the rights to not want to be treated as tools.
We are definitely approaching a moral gray area if we decide to build machine for the purpose of them being tools and giving them consciousness.

Because if we want to use a tool, they don’t need to have a consciousness. We can just build them to perform a certain task, but the moment to give them a consciousness, they are no more just a tool. They are some form of sentient being that should be treated as such.

So that is basically, a brief summary of my argument in favor of cyborgs and their access to rights. I believe they should have access to these rights to their life and to protect their life and to live independent of human influence for these reasons.

So, I mean, I know I just briefly went over these topics. I plan to discuss more in depth if you find this content interesting in the following episodes, but I’m curious to hear your thoughts on this.

Do you believe cyborgs should have rights equal or if not more than human beings do, and if not, you can tell me why in the comments I’m looking forward to hearing what you guys think about this. So, I would see you guys in the next episode. I hope you have a great rest of your day.

Bye for Now!