This Is Not Your Grandfather’s EU

I hope, because EU, look at you now (OK, some of you following along at home might see that I’m mixing ads and old songs.  Noted.)

Mady Delvaux, a Socialist MEP from Luxembourg, thinks robots should be considered to be persons and have rights.

Delvaux authored a report that proposes giving legal status to robots and categorize them as “electronic persons.”

But we should be able to kill those robot persons solely on our say so.  They should have kill switches which we can activate when we think they’re going to cause “dangerous damages.”  And this requirement of Delvaux’:

You always have to tell people that robot is not a human and a robot will never be a human.  You must never think that a robot is a human and that he loves you.

There are persons and there are persons, so, you know, separate but maybe not so equal.  But she has a solution for that, too.  Robots should be

made with operations that comply to all applicable laws and ethical principles.

Yeah, that’s the ticket.  We’ve done such a wonderful job of programming humans to comply with all applicable laws—even those laws that conflict with each other—and we’ve done an even better job of programming our laws to comply with our ethical principles—whatever we’ve been able to determine those to be.  Sure.

Only in the EU.

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