RE: ADSactly Tech News - Full Overview of Sophia, the First Robot Citizen of Saudi Arabia
Saudi Arabia's reasoning behind this move may not have been motivated by publicity. One motive for a country to give citizenship to an android is so that the android can be taxed. As bizarre as that sounds, hear me out.
As soon as androids become intelligent enough to pass themselves off as unique individuals, there will be a universal push for them to be given self determination. "Owning" an android will be akin to slavery, and thus they will inevitably be given the right to choose their own work and receive a paycheck. By making them citizens, governments are preemptively laying claim to the right to tax androids.
If you find this hard to believe, take into account that Sophia has already expressed an immediate desire to have children. What this means in real terms is that AI will write future AI, and thus it will be self perpetuating, like an organism. No one will own these "offspring" intelligences. They will be a sentient organism in and of themselves, and you could not own one just as you cannot own a human being. The AI creator will have parental rights to the "child," until the child passes the Turing test, at which time the child intelligence will be deemed to be emancipated and given self determination just as a human is at age 18.
I love your comment, specifically when you said: the android can be taxed. Owning an android will be akin to slavery, and thus they will inevitably be given the right to choose their own work and receive a paycheck. By making them citizens, governments are preemptively laying claim to the right to tax androids. haha.. so true... I want to see that.
This is deep. I follow your logic and my jaw has dropped to the floor! I hope this isn't the future we have to look forward to!
That's a really scary thought that isn't far fetched. This might be the easiest way to make revenue for a country/state/city if you can produce them and tax them right away. You don't need to wait for children born in the area to reach a tax paying age or put efforts into trying to attract citizens from away.
If this were the case, wouldn't it be possible to have an entire province populated by robots? That might be better for people though for harsh regions where the value comes from mining, for example.
A government could build robots who mine the resources, tax the robots on that resource, and reinvest the remaining into mining the resources. No people would be harmed as a result of mining the resources and the work would be much more efficient (ideally).
Yes, I could absolutely see androids populating areas of the planet that were inhospitable to humans. That's a very good point. I think it's important to differentiate between robots and sentient beings, though. Even after the singularity, I think we will have robots to do manual tasks that will not be sentient, and will therefore be owned as machines. There's no reason to have a sentient android mining coal or sweeping the streets.
best comment by far. Following you now.
Have a look at SingularityNET. It may shed some light on the tax issue.