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by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness”? The spectrum of current humans is vast. In 1776, “Men” did not include people of color or women. Even today, humans born with congenital cognitive or behavioral issues are destined for unequal (albeit in most cases compassionate) treatment—Down syndrome, Tay-Sachs disease, Fragile X syndrome, cerebral palsy, and so on.

And as we change geographical location and mature, our unequal rights change dramatically. Embryos, infants, children, teens, adults, patients, felons, gender identities and gender preferences, the very rich and very poor—all of these face different rights and socioeconomic realities. One path to new mind-types obtaining and retaining rights similar to the most elite humans would be to keep a Homo component, like a human shield or figurehead monarch/CEO, signing blindly enormous technical documents, making snap financial, health, diplomatic, military, or security decisions. We will probably have great difficulty pulling the plug, modifying, or erasing (killing) a computer and its memories—especially if it has befriended humans and made spectacularly compelling pleas for survival (as all excellent researchers fighting for their lives would do).

Even Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, has weighed in on this topic, supported by experiments at Eindhoven University in 2005 noting how susceptible humans are to a robot-as-victim equivalent of the Milgram experiments done at Yale beginning in 1961. Given the many rights of corporations, including ownership of property, it seems likely that other machines will obtain similar rights, and it will be a struggle to maintain inequities of selective rights along multi-axis gradients of intellect and ersatz feelings.

Radically Divergent Rules for Humans versus Nonhumans and Hybrids
The divide noted above for intra Homo sapiens variation in rights explodes into a riot of inequality as soon as we move to entities that overlap (or will soon) the spectrum of humanity. In Google Street View, people’s faces and car license plates are blurred out. Video devices are excluded from many settings, such as courts and committee meetings. Wearable and public cameras with facial-recognition software touch taboos. Should people with hyperthymesia or photographic memories be excluded from those same settings?

Shouldn’t people with prosopagnosia (face blindness) or forgetfulness be able to benefit from facial-recognition software and optical character recognition wherever they go, and if them, then why not everyone? If we all have those tools to some extent, shouldn’t we all be able to benefit?

These scenarios echo Kurt Vonnegut’s 1961 short story “Harrison Bergeron,” in which exceptional aptitude is suppressed in deference to the mediocre lowest common denominator of society. Thought experiments like John Searle’s Chinese Room and Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics all appeal to the sorts of intuitions plaguing human brains that Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky, and others have demonstrated. The Chinese Room experiment posits that a mind composed of mechanical and Homo sapiens parts cannot be conscious, no matter how competent at intelligent human (Chinese) conversation, unless a human can identify the source of the consciousness and “feel” it. Enforced preference for Asimov’s First and Second Laws favor human minds over any other mind meekly present in his Third Law, of self-preservation.

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