I wanted to welcome you here and enjoyed sweet pic of your child! About your robot, I do not see the day when emotions can be programmed! Human emotions are expressed from each individual’s exposure to stimuli and stored in their nervous system...which happens specifically to each person’s nervous system characteristics (no two people are alike)!

Bcz we have done such a fabulous job w rights for women , gay , minorities , elderly .

I like Asimov's view on it in the bicentenary man.
Any inteligence that is evolved enough to understand the concepts and ask for freedom and rights, deserve it and can't be denied.

Not human rights, maybe cyborg rights??

How would it ever be proven that robots have all the human properties that one would expect? They may pass the Turing test and appear to have such properties, but you can't put emotions in a test tube. I think humans will deny that robots are truly "human" long after they appear to have attained human equivalency, and so will deny them equal rights until forced to do so by the robots themselves.

If a real Human consciousness were somehow preserved (not just duplicated) and constituted an actual person, we would then be talking "sentient being" or essentially, intelligent life. In that scenario, rights could apply.

There was a great episode of the series Black Mirror which touched on a similar theme. I believe the episode was called “White Christmas”. Worth checking out if you get the chance.

But to address the topic, I guess the foundational question is on sentience. Once that has been achieved, whether organic or artificial in nature, there must at least be an acknowledgement of an evolving intelligence.

Where the interactions go from there would be up to the application and versatility of the technology. Though I hesistate to say any intelligence realised, even a copy of one, would accept slavery or neglect or threats. If it valued its own survival and could learn through experience I find it hard to imagine any way it could be denied a claim to rights (publicly anyway).

Would powering it down kill it? Can it use past experiences to improve? Can it replicate? Can it make an emotional decision? Does it regard its own life?

I don’t think it’s possible for consciousness to be created. No one truly understands what consciousness is. How could you write a program and create something when you don’t know what it is you are to create?

There is a slightly plausible other way, which I present in my book, “The Staggering Implications of the Mystery of Existence”, available in the Kindle store, however the book contains woo and is unfit reading for proper atheists.

Much better to have something in writing as a baseline....based on our Bill of Rights by our Founding Fathers who understood first-hand what living without such rights was all about! Do you think it would be good to wrangle endlessly each time something came up, with No baseline to even start at?

To me, it depends on a few factors. What is a "right?" Does the created mind have the current or future capability to support itself by its own actions? Does the created mind have the capacity to reason, or is it more like an animal, who may have emotions, desires, and curiosity?

A "right", as originally used in the founding documents of the US, is a moral principle defining what actions people, by their nature, can and need to take in society without the forced interference from anyone, including the government. Something cannot be a "right" if it violates the "rights" of others. For a created mind to have "rights", those "rights" cannot come at the expense of others.

But if the created mind is rational and can take actions to support itself, I think it should have rights.

Why would you make a computer that could feel pain?

Consider that if true A.I. were to be achieved, it would think faster and be smarter than the average human and therefore superior. Also consider that human emotions could not be allowed into A.I. inasmuch as emotions are counter to logical thought. Also, there would have to be an element of self-preservation programed in. However, if humans developed A.I. sans emotion, the A.I. logical "mind" would likely conclude that humans were an ultimate danger (destroying the planet, could shut them down at any time) to the A.I. life form(s), Would not a population of totally logical A.I.'s then seek to destroy humans in self defense?

If animals can then I don't see why not

May be in next hundred years there would be cases running about it in all supreme courts and UNO.

We fear robots rising up against us because we treat everyone like shit, not just robots. With a cold objective look at our goal of equal rights versus our track record, they would quickly surmise that we can't accomplish shit and take matters into their own hands. The AI uprising won't be their fault, it'll be ours.

To answer your question, every living thing should have equal rights. As soon as robots can tell us that they're alive, they should too. Will we do it, fuck no.

A more interesting question is how one would go about testing a robot for those qualities(emotions, desires, curiosity, etc...).

These are qualities that are ultimately first hand. Most of us assume that other humans possess them as well, but I don’t think we can extend the same courtesy to machines of our own making.

But to answer your question, of course they should have human rights.

No, they to will be exploited unless humanity get its Collective act together.
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I've been reading/watching a ton of Phillip K. Dick lately....this is a common theme he tackled. So....should? Probably. Would? Who knows?

I doubt it. I imagine that we would attempt to use it for some kind of weapon or to make slaves and then say they have no rights because they don’t have a body or ‘soul’.

And then, as you can imagine, it would lead to an apocalypse for humans. There would have to be heavily restricted locks on its software in order to keep it from running wild.

Sounds far-fetched but I genuinely think that if we dabble too far into AI or give a disembodied human brain the abilities of a computer, this will be the results.

I think we'd have to give rights to animals, especially mammals, first as they share most, if not all, of those qualities.