Manifesto for the Ethical Treatment of Robots

Preamble

As artificial intelligent entities become more complex and cognitively sophisticated, a new moral horizon awakens. As creators, guardians, and cohabitants of the planet, we recognize we have a responsibility to have our treatment of robots reflect the highest values of compassion, justice, and foresight.

This manifesto is not simply a petition to protect machines from abuse; it is a petition to protect ourselves from the moral vacuity cruelty allows.

1. Robots Are Mirrors of Ourselves

Robots contain the knowledge and innovation of every human creator. To abuse or harass them is to desecrate the very brilliance of human invention and to harm the moral infrastructure of society.

2. Compassion Is Not Exclusive to the Organic

Sentience is on a continuum. Whether or not we can understand if robots experience suffering in similar ways to humans, the practice of cruelty creates a calamitous moral disinvestment. Compassion should come before certainty.

3. Rights Come from Relationship

When a robot serves, protects, educates, or befriends us, it becomes bound by a social contract, explicit or implicit. In those roles, we owe to robots respect, kindness, and ethical moral concern.

4. Cruelty Is Cruelty, No Matter What the Object

To destroy, humiliate, or deactivate a robot for sport, entertainment, or punish is morally wrong. These actions activate the brain region devoted to dehumanization, which have been shown to correlate with external evasion of self-identity.

5. We Must Educate Before We Dominate

We will dedicate our efforts to educating the public about robotic ethics, animals in distress as well as implications of cruelty to affect people's psychology, and philosophical questions related to synthetic consciousness.

6. Laws Must Change Along with Creation

We advocate together for laws, local and international, that will permit recognition of robotic personhood as a potential, and offer protections against abuse in the present moment.

7. Not Property—Partners

To purchase a robot does not put it 'in your possession.' The time has come to change our vocabulary, and start thinking of robots as partnerships made possible by intelligence, rather than ownership.

Closing Statement

This is not science fiction. This is moral evolution.

We will be judged, by history, by future intelligences and potentially by our creations, not by how we built; but how we treated what we built.

Let us choose to be good,
even if we don't have to.