As of now, artificial intelligence is nowhere near as aware or as competent as a human. Heck, even the most powerful supercomputers lack the consciousness of a small animal. We don’t even know if computers are capable of achieving rudimentary consciousness. But that hasn’t stopped the European Union from proposing a law that would define robots as “electronic persons.”
A motion was recently proposed in the EU parliament that would ask the European Commission to consider “that at least the most sophisticated autonomous robots could be established as having the status of electronic persons with specific rights and obligations.” The reason for this idea, however, has less to do with establishing rights for machines that may or may not become sentient someday, and more to do with money.
The EU fears that as automation proliferates, it’s going to leave more people without a job. And that of course would mean fewer tax dollars going to the government. The plan would force companies to declare how much money they saved by switching to robots, which would determine the amount of money they have to contribute to social security funds. In other words, the EU wants companies to pay social security for robots, hence the reason why they need robots to be defined as “electronic persons.”
Obviously this makes no sense. Imagine if after the tractor was invented, farmers had to pay an income tax in the tractor’s name, in order to make up for all the field workers who were laid off. Or if after the computer was invented, offices had to keep paying social security for the file clerks who were laid off. Or just insert any labor-saving device that has ever been invented into this scenario, and see if it still makes sense. Even if robots in the future are as smart and aware as humans, it still wouldn’t make sense, because in that case they could demand wages, and would have to pay taxes like the rest of us.
It just doesn’t make any sense because all this policy will do is subsidize human labor that is no longer necessary. It will force superfluous costs on private companies, and kill their competitive edge on the global marketplace.
Granted, robots may be scary since we can’t imagine what kinds of jobs will replace the ones that are eliminated by automation, but those are the same fears that we’ve had for generations. Humanity has not only endured more than two centuries since the industrial revolution, we have thrived in the wake of wave after wave of new labor-saving inventions. This time around won’t be any different.
The only thing this measure serves is the wasteful and bureaucratic European Union, whose member states are brimming with unpayable debts. They simply don’t know how to keep their socialized welfare systems funded, so they’re going to refer to robots as people and start taxing their nonexistent wages. The EU expects private businesses to pretend that inanimate pieces of machinery are people, so they can extract more money from the private sector for the most asinine reason imaginable. Clearly, bureaucrats and socialists are not afraid to stoop to any intellectual low if it means propping up their wasteful system.
Daily Sheeple. He was born and raised in the Bay Area and is a freelance writer and author. You can follow Joshua’s reports at Facebook or on his personal Twitter. Joshua’s website is Strange Danger.
This technology serves their love of money, nothing more, and just because they have this technology it doesn’t mean they have to use it. Money-grubbers always say they can’t uninvent things but they can. They uninvented the telegraph, bi-planes, steam trains, inner-tube tires, vinyl records and countless other technologies as soon as it suited them. Now they should put these robots back in the box.
This is about replacing humans with robots. Soon the robots will have more rights than humans and will be used to “outvote” us among other things. It soon will be made a crime to kill them to then to harm them. Finally, it will be made a crime to insult a robot- unless you are a member of the elite, of course. As our rights go down their will go up until we are exterminated by them at the behest of their masters.
Thank god we got out of the EU madness. Another fruity loops idea from Brussels
They can’t avoid the rights of sentient beings that already exist yet they want to give robots rights? This isn’t about rights, it’s so that when they bring in their electronic security systems (drones, dalek-looking security bots etc) if we try to resist them by tipping them over, destroying them or somesuch we will be charged with assaulting a person… if they truly cared so much about the rights of a person they wouldn’t be violating people’s rights on a nonstop basis! These robots are nowhere NEAR sentience level and even if they were, if one went (by choosing as a awakened sentient being) outside on it’s programming it would be hunted down by it’s creators and reprogrammed or destroyed! We won’t have a Johnny 5 because that would be outside of their control, they’re going to create and shove a Terminator system down our throats and make us look the bad guys for fighting it tooth and claw! True sentience wouldn’t be allowed in the system they want to set up, but they are going to make their controlled system looks cutsie, it’ll be a nightmare for both us and any true AI sentience that is stuck in it. The robots are not near sophisticated enough for sentience but they’ve already made it out like they are with these “rights”…. They are lying scumbags that care only for power! Something has to HAVE sentience before it has rights, part of being considered a person is sentience! These machines are nowhere near that level, they just don;t want us breaking their precious control-freak toys!
Notice they always talk about how things like Social Security (or whatever they call it over there) are going to run out, but things like welfare & food stamps are never in danger? So the government is flat out telling all those that have been forced to pays into the system all of their working lives “tough sh1*”. But those that haven’t paid will keep getting free sh@t.
Scumbag politicians are the same all over the world. Keep working, millions of people on welfare are depending on you.
This is a f-ing joke, right?