Saudi Arabia Becomes First Nation To Grant Citizenship To Humanoid Robot (foxbusiness.com)

Saudi Arabia became the first country in the world to offer citizenship to a humanoid robot, but Brad Keywell, CEO of Uptake, a predictive analytics technology company, told FOX Business on Thursday artificial intelligence (AI) will not replace humans anytime soon. From a report: "Humans are made super-human through the intelligence that can be derived from these sensors and there is a clear argument that's made about the possibility that there will be no humans, there'd be just autonomous everything... but this is something that has historically involved humans and I just don't see that changing," he told Maria Bartiromo on "Mornings with Maria." Uptake's products are used in a collection of industries ranging from energy to aviation, helping "people and machines work better and faster," according to the company website.

Comments

Women? Foreign workers?

[angel'o'sphere]

The subject says it. Perhaps those should get citizenship first? Or proper treatment and rights?

Conversion to Democracy!

[Anonymous Coward]

Saudi Arabia can finally be a democracy! Where all the robots vote for the current monarch.

What a preposterous notion

[Anubis IV]

Even if you believe that we'll one day have strong AI that is intelligent in every way that we think of ourselves as being intelligent, we can all agree that we're not there yet. We're nowhere close, in fact.

So if you've just conferred human rights to an object, how long until we see people protesting with signs that read "Software updates are murder"? After all, you'd effectively be destroying the very essence of one of your citizens if you replace the thing that makes them intelligent—their software—with something else. And if they do it voluntarily, do we call it suicide? Are we allowed to reuse their robotic chassis if they don't sign off as an organ donor? Can we sell their body parts, or is that illegal? Are minor software updates okay, in the same way that we're okay with prosthetics? At what point does this a ship of Theseus situation, where it's still them, even though nothing is still the same?

Perhaps a more pragmatic question: can it vote? If so, and if updating their software isn't disallowed, what's to stop me from making millions of them and programming them all to vote according to my wishes?

Well, "subject" would be more accurate.

[hey!]

This is an absolute monarchy after all, so it's really more a claim of authority over than a grant of rights to.

The only constitutional limitation of the Saudi monarchy is compliance with Sharia, the Quran and Sunnah. Insofar as these documents do not grant rights to machines of any sort, granting "citizenship" to a robot is effectively meaningless.