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minimize global existential risks, like supervolcanoes and asteroids. But should we say “should”? (Disclaimer: In this and many other cases, when a technologist describes a societal path that “could,” “would,” or “should” happen, this doesn’t necessarily equate to the preferences of the author. It could reflect warning, uncertainty, and/or detached assessment.) Roboticist Gianmarco Veruggio and others have raised issues of roboethics since 2002; the U.K. Department of Trade and Industry and the RAND spin-off Institute for the Future have raised issues of robot rights since 2006. “Ts versus ought” It is commonplace to say that science concerns “is,” not “ought.” Stephen Jay Gould’s “non-overlapping magisteria” view argues that facts must be completely distinct from values. Similarly, the 1999 document Science and Creationism from the U.S. National Academy of Sciences noted that “science and religion occupy two separate realms.” This 166 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_016969
February 7, 2026 at 11:08 PM
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THE RIGHTS OF MACHINES George M. Church George M. Church is Robert Winthrop Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School; Professor of Health Sciences and Technology, Harvard-MIT; and co-author (with Ed Regis) of Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves. In 1950, Norbert Wiener’s Zhe Human Use of Human Beings was at the cutting edge of vision and speculation in proclaiming that the machine like the djinnee, which can learn and can make decisions on the basis of its learning, will in no way be obliged to make such decisions as we should have made, or will be acceptable to us. . .. Whether we entrust our decisions to machines of metal, or to those machines of flesh and blood which are bureaus and vast laboratories and armies and corporations, . . . [t]he hour is very late, and the choice of good and evil knocks at our door. But this was his book’s denouement, and it has left us hanging now for sixty-eight years, lacking not only prescriptions and proscriptions but even a well-articulated “problem statement.” We have since seen similar warnings about the threat of our machines, even in the form of outreach to the masses, via films like Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970), The Terminator (1984), The Matrix (1999), and Ex Machina (2015). But now the time is ripe for a major update, with fresh, new perspectives—notably focused on generalizations of our “human” rights and our existential needs. Concern has tended to focus on “us versus them [robots]” or “grey goo [nanotech]” or “monocultures of clones [bio].” To extrapolate current trends: What if we could make or grow almost anything and engineer any level of safety and efficacy desired? Any thinking being (made of any arrangement of atoms) could have access to any technology. Probably we should be less concerned about us-versus-them and more concerned about the rights of all sentients in the face of an emerging unprecedented diversity of minds. We should be harnessing this diversity to
February 7, 2026 at 11:08 PM