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.