Rights based on intelligence

The documentary’s objectivity has further been called into question by the discovery that Irwin herself had some passed ties to the radical Construct Rights group Nyx. Alleged ties, so far unsubstantiated. All we know is that she was investigated by Helius for a possible connection to them, but never charged with anything. She has rightly pointed out that this is meaningless, as the point of an investigation is to determine the possibility of guilt, not to assume it.

It’s a controversial documentary because it’s unclear as to how some of the footage was obtained.

According to Irwin, the “dilemma” is thus: how does one determine what rights to bestow upon other creatures? Or rather which rights are which creatures entitled to, and why?

One of the conclusions discussed is that we have largely based rights on intelligence. Specifically, on the mean intelligence of a particular species, more than any other factor. We don’t afford dogs the same rights as humans, for example, because they are relatively unintelligent. But they are intelligent enough to experience pain and some semblance of emotions, so they are given a lower level of rights.

We give people with extreme mental handicaps the same rights as other humans because we recognize the complexity and moral danger of varying our treatment of others — the generally expected intelligence and emotional capacity for suffering establishes a baseline for how people are treated.

Here we can see the problem with applying our usual methods of assigning rights to AI. There are at least two frightening scenarios here, Irwin argues. First, that we fail to scale the rights of androids in pace with their growing intelligence. Second, and this is the more worrying aspect for us, if a society of AI had similar standards for bestowing rights on other creatures, once it reached the point where its intelligence far dwarfed our own the way ours dwarfs a dog’s or even insects, they would be justified under this same paradigm to treat humans as insects.

In that sense, this problem is not anything like racism, in some ways it is the opposite. For a portion of history, some countries enslaved other ethnicities under the belief that they were naturally unintelligent and were better off enslaved. Part of what has caused racism to become increasingly obscure and unacceptable by society is the scientific understanding of how human brains work — we no longer decide that because this or that group has cranial lumps in a certain place it is best off as a slave.