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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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