The Legal Rights of Sentient Machines

Speaker 1

And next up before the court is Marcus Flinders. Marcus is the guy who is responsible for arranging our lunch. Thank you very much. He is also the founding attorney and managing partner of Flinders Bandy Attorneys at Law, and specializes in corporate and business law as well as. Tax planning and litigation. He has over fifteen years of experience as an entrepreneur and businessman. He holds a BS in philosophy from Utah Valley University and a JD from Valparaiso. and an LLM in taxation from the University of Denver. So he was on the far end of that MTA survey scale of education there. Marcus served a mission to Cote d’Ivoire for the LDS Church, is married and has three children, and he will be speaking on the legal rights of sentient machines.

Marcus Flinders

They should call that a BS and BS. Isn’t that what a philosophy degree is?

Marcus Flinders

Three lawyers in a row, huh? I got some quotes for you. Our religion incorporates every act and word of man. No man should go to merchandising unless he does it in God. No man should go to farming or any other business unless he does it in the Lord. No lawyer no Hold on. I’ll leave the lawyers out. We do not want them. We have no use for them. Brigham Young.

Marcus Flinders

He has one more really good one. Now, I ask every man and woman who wishes an honorable name in the church and kingdom of God upon earth, if they have entertained any idea of going to law, to banish it from their minds at once.

Marcus Flinders

I feel good that I have such a great and respected profession. So my topic today is on having rights for sentient beings. I mean, it is something that I believe that we’re going to have to face in the coming years. And as lawyers, and you just heard from a great conversation hear from a lawyer or assumed to be lawyer. And constitutional rights is right where the sentient being argument is going to be.

Marcus Flinders

And so as we get to the discussion about sentient beings, I want to reflect a little bit on the history of Or sentient machines, I should say, as opposed to our own humanity. So I want to look back at some of the history of rights. Our own James Carroll always gets mad at me because I don’t use enough utilitarian arguments. So I’ll at least mention utilitarianism in this. argument.

Marcus Flinders

But most of our rights arguments date back to Socrates and Aristotle and start with the natural argument that there’s a moral or God created inherent right. That human beings have, and that just continued to evolve. Of course, you have Hobbes and then you have Locke And then the contrary argument, so James will be happy with this, came from Bentham and Mill. And they said that here you have this moral argument, and how do you You know, create a moral argument for a human being and say, well, he’s a God-created entity and he should deserve all these rights. Well, basically, if you turn that around and you can’t prove it, first of all, from a scientific method, you can’t. and then you say they have this that one human being has all these rights and you legislate it that they have all these rights, then by introducing the second person, you’ve already violated the first person’s rights. So you’re always violating people’s rights. It’s a very difficult argument, but it keeps coming back. It’s being circulated. And even after Bentham and Mill have made their arguments, you see it codified essentially in the Declaration of Independence.

Marcus Flinders

When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature And nature’s God entitled them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to separation. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. That they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. That among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Marcus Flinders

Now, this comes from Locke, right? Life, Liberty, and Property. Well, not long after that, so that’s 1776. History, you know, we know that date. Just a few years later, we have the Constitutional Convention, and in there is the Great Compromise. So, from a practical perspective, or maybe from a utilitarian point of view, it was the means to an end to go ahead and segregate The life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness from a certain group of people, particularly the black person. So they were black people were designated as property. Property became a utility. We how do we value somebody? We value somebody based on what their use is to the power, to the power People, the power people at the time, was the white American. The white American needed the black African who they brought over, so let’s compromise, form America. Well

Marcus Flinders

Here we go, 1857. That’s quite a long time after this Constitution. We have for Our legal buffs here. What the Supreme Court today calls probably the lowest point of the history of the Supreme Court, the Dred Scott case. 1857, in a 7-2 decision, the Supreme Court decided that blacks were beings of an inferior order and altogether unfit to associate with the white race. Either in social or political relations, and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.

Marcus Flinders

It goes on to say, Thus we are satisfied upon a careful examination of all the cases decided in the State Courts of Missouri. Referred to that it is now firmly settled by the decisions of the highest court in the state that Scott and his family, upon their return, were not free, but were, by the laws of Missouri, the property of the defendant, a slave and not a citizen.

Marcus Flinders

Alright, so you know we’re we obviously have then the South making these kind of comments. I I find this Quite intriguing. This is in a paper. The nation has achieved a triumph in response to the Dred Scott case. Sectionalism has been rebuked, and abolitionism has been staggered and stunned. So there we go.

Marcus Flinders

1868 though. So just so everybody’s aware, the Dred Scott case has never been overruled. Okay? Never has been. We ca we as a people decided finally we needed to amend the Constitution and created well, first, Lincoln inspired the Thirteenth Amendment To ban slavery, but then the Fourteenth Amendment gives the equal protection to all persons and, in essence, granted personhood to black people. And I think that was really good of us to do.

Marcus Flinders

So today we see an evolutionary trend in human rights across the world. And in fact, I don’t even think the United States would be considered the leader of the human rights race anymore. But the United Nations has adopted language, and you can contrast this with the previous language I did. I said before and I really like this. I have studied a lot of United Nations Acts, and here in the Convention Against Torture, you hear things like any act by which severe pain, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession. You know, is illegal. Now they say any person, and it’s been tried, and that’s any person, doesn’t matter what Color skin they have, what sex they are, and it even makes Brad happy because it doesn’t matter what kind of body parts they have down in the nether regions.

Marcus Flinders

So the reason I introduced that is any kind of rights argument is a gradual progression. And we, the power people, whoever the power people are, have a lot of say in this. And so we’re going to have to look at this In relations to machines, to robots, to and what I would argue the probably one of the hardest thing that’s going to be is The integration of humanity and machinery. We already see this.

Marcus Flinders

I think Lincoln posted something the other day about Google Glass, and that immediately you’ve got these haven’t even come out yet. And they’ve already got legislation saying that you can’t drive cars while wearing them. Well, you know, there’s a safety uh perspective of this, but as we just heard from Our constitutional argument, we have rights, and then we have all these legislators who say, you know, there’s this safety thing. Well, it’s still discrimination, right? we are taking away a right from a people, and we have someone with an integration with technology who’s losing a right to drive their car by using that technology. Is it justified? We don’t know yet, but it still is discrimination.

Marcus Flinders

So, one of the ways to help us understand how we get to the rights of machinery in the future is to look at how we’ve gotten to the rights of animals. And you have several different arguments for the rights of animals, of course, that are different from the rights of humans. You have one of the most extreme is the abolitionist argument, and this kind of argument really focuses on a natural Bright’s perspective. They say the that animals have moral rights. These are the people that you hear talk about ethical veganism. It’s You know, complete abolishment of using or eating or taking advantage of animals in any way that would be non-beneficial to them.

Marcus Flinders

You have deontological argument that says that’s a fairly straightforward argument that says that Animals can’t be the means to our ends. They have to have their own ends. So, whatever we do to help animals or to be with animals, we have to look at their positive ends as to how they are used, right?

Marcus Flinders

And then there’s this scientific argument that I like is this evolutionary parallels with humanity. So you show where humans came from and you show where animals are and If within that animal is even over time, in evolutionary time, the possibility that you can become human, then you have a right given to that animal. So there’s a lot of different Arguments, Peter Singer, the utilitarian argument is probably the most common around the world. And his argument is that animals actually have interests and are aware of their interests. Because of that, they deserve rights.

Marcus Flinders

Alright, so some of the rights that animals have, though, are more legal rights as opposed to fundamental rights. We have fundamental rights: the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Now. We also have legal rights. We take and define what life, liberty, and whether you’re talking to Kennedy or Scalia, that’s a whole different ballgame, right, of what that really means. We’re going to have to deal with that in the machine life as well.

Marcus Flinders

So are there some church arguments that support Even the rights of these animals. And I believe that there are. There’s actually quite a lot. If you date back to the times of Bergam Young and Joseph Smith, there were, here’s one from Orson Pratt. I said, all flesh. Will be resurrected, and that includes animals as well as human, and they will receive the Spirit of God poured out upon them. And he says this has clearly been spoken of in the prophecies.

Marcus Flinders

George Albert Smith was highly critical of those who tortured their oxen. to get them to move. He did not like that that people would use animals in a torturous way.

Marcus Flinders

If the people this is Brigham Young. If the people could see as an angel sees They would behold a great sin in neglecting the stock which the Lord has given them. That’s a Brigham Young quote.

Marcus Flinders

And then so animals symbolize a willingness to grant degrees. So here’s the problem between the animals and the machines: is animals oftentimes are looked at as a degree of animalia, and humans fit into that degree of animalia. Machines are a different kind. Then the question then becomes, and you kind of look at insects, insects are kind of looked at on a degree of animalia, it seems like we can step and smash on them. I mean, it’s much So when you think of saying, well, when I eat my tomato sauce, I can have sixty parts insect per 100 ounces, I think the first instinct is that’s just gross for me, right?

Marcus Flinders

But then when we hear that horses are slaughtered and it takes three to four shots in the head to get them to go down, and then they’re still alive and hung upside down and slaughtered Before they turn into hamburger meat. Okay, there’s a part that’s saying it’s gross for us, but there’s another part that’s really empathetic for this horse. And we feel That it’s being tortured. We don’t care about how long it took for the animal to get or the insect to get ground up in the tomatoes.

Marcus Flinders

So there’s definitely, we look at this degree, and Brigham Young talked about this, that there are different degrees, even of intelligence among humanity, and he took it all the way back to animals, insects, and even the vegetation ki the vegetable kingdom, as he called it. Okay, so there are degrees, but how do we look at that?

Marcus Flinders

The thing that gives me hope, and this is kind of funny, is that we do have to look at things, and I think it really boils down to There is a power issue, but there’s also a practical issue. Now I don’t have an answer for what it is going to take, and at what point is the demarcation of rights for Machines. Do I feel sad when my iPad dies? Only if it is a good iPad for a long time, right? I pretty much expected all my Windows machines to die pretty quickly. So, you know.

Marcus Flinders

But there are some movies that lend the hope that we need and the understanding in your own lives. If you look at one of my favorite TV shows and series, Battlestar Galactica. And you see, and it plays this role for you right in front of your face. You have the Cylons who are the machines, and they look like robots. And then you have the Cylons that look like machines, but then they turn their free will switch on. And then you have the Cylons that they’ve made look like humans, exactly like humans. And when the ones the first ones I spoke of get killed, you’re kind of like, whoa, okay. And the second ones, once they have free will, you start feeling sorry for them. And the third ones, you don’t feel any difference. In fact, you start getting mad at the humans for For killing them, and they just blew up your whole planet, right? So you immediately turn that sympathy over.

Marcus Flinders

One of the things to look at, and before I get to the end, and I’m running out of time here, is that you have the three fundamental rights. And if you take the three fundamental rights that we have and we extrapolate that To animalia and machinery, we can see the progression and the eventuality. You’ve got right to life as deserved because we’re self-aware, right to liberty because we have free will, right to happiness because we have feelings, emotions, and pain. Computers that already can do portions of some of it. You know, Dragon Voice is amazing. You know, you have all these computers that are starting to experience pain, can recognize, can see the world around them. Okay, so.

Marcus Flinders

The next question that gets posed to you is, Well, you can turn all that off on a machine. So, you know, it’s not we’re creating it. Well, guess what? When you go into surgery, we turn it off on you. So, do we get to do whatever we want to you when we turn off your ability to feel pain? You have to look at this and turn it on its head to understand that machinery is going to be Talked about amongst us.

Marcus Flinders

And just to close, there is plenty within our own scripture that helps us to understand that even the big obstacle among Mormonism. Within this argument, is that there’s how are you going to have a soul in a machine? It’s d dependent upon a soul or an intelligence. Well, one of the great quotes that I love is Is this from Brigham Young? He says, So, when those spirits come to take bodies, it’s not God forcing them into body. He says, So when those spirits come to take bodies, Where will the noble and high order of them go? And he says, I will take a body through an honorable parentage. I will have a body that will correspond with my mind. So, think about how great the bodies that we can create are going to be and the souls that are going to want to enter those bodies if, in fact, that’s what we’re looking at, a ghost in the machine type argument.

Marcus Flinders

The other argument is that Intelligence will just intelligence attracts intelligence and will merge into the creations that we designate and that we’re in charge of. So there’s a whole lot more that I could talk about, but that’s it, and I appreciate your time.