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Legal Rights for Computers
nicholast writes "There's a really smart story in the current issue of Legal Affairs Magazine about granting legal recognition to computers: when that might happen, why it could happen, and what a discussion about it will teach humans about themselves."
There is a world of difference between programming something to *act* as though it has emotions, and something actually having an emotional or original response.
No. Emotions are not something that can be handed over to an other to be analyzed, double checked, or confirmed. There is absolutely no difference if the performance is ouwardly the same. See "The Cyberiad" by Stanislaw Lem.
The original stories were all about that, though. Susan Calvin was basically the only one that ascribed emotions to the robots - for everyone else they were just tools 90% of the time.
Even then she never ascribed malice to the robots... she didn't think they were alive. It was always the others that did that (when it suited them - a kind of exagerrated version of when we shout at our computers).
It always turned out to be the humans at fault if a robot was accused of something - it always did exactly what it was told.
I haven't seen the film but I suspect it destroys this separation in the name of 'coolness' - the previews look awful.
You have to understand that conferring a rank is an executive act and does not constitute a conclusive declaration of the applicable law, which is an exercise of judicial power.
The situation is a little complicated since Starfleet, like other military organizations, runs its own courts martial. To simplify things, consider if Data were an officer in a civilian police force whose operation is subject ultimately to the control of the civilian courts. To get in, he would have to be duly sworn and appointed by an appropriate officer of the relevant agency. That officer would have the power to appoint people, but the power would not extend to appointing, say, horses. Any attempt to appoint a horse would be legally meaningless and the horse's status in law would not change, regardless of whether said horse was treated by its supposed colleagues and superiors as having all the benefits and privileges of rank and its antecedent requirement of legal personality. So too it would be with Data or any other AI: the executive does not declare the law through the exercise of its ordinary or inherent functions, even when a person tries to hold the executive to that interpretation in a later dispute.
Like I say, Starfleet runs its own courts, and I'm not an expert on military law so I can't say whether the same separation of powers exists. There's no reason why it shouldn't, and the episode certainly isn't legally senseless.
And yes, IAAL.