Imagine your keyboard was alive, imagine it had emotions and feelings. Would it be angry at you for constantly pushing the buttons on its body? Would that be considered abuse? All this would seem silly at first thought, how can an inanimate object like a keyboard be alive? But given the rapid-fire developments in artificial intelligence and machine learning, it wouldn’t be surprising if within the next 3 to 8 decades we start developing sentient robots. They may not be as smart as humans, but they may be conscious enough to have emotions and feelings. So at that point, treating these conscious systems like a class of "property", would be slavery.
As humans, we have held a very long history of not giving the same rights to all on the basis that they are different from us. It would seem logical that we probably wouldn’t want to give self-aware robots the same equality. And in all perspectives, many would argue that robots are created by humans and they should serve them. But in a similar point of view, all humans are created by other humans. If anytime in the future artificial intelligence of the same level as ours is created, then we would have to give them the same rights that we have. The only difference between us and them would be that we would be made from flesh and blood while they would be made from steel, plastic or some imaginary element like vibranium from the future.
Now if we do decide to give these conscious robots rights, a much bigger question is posed to us. What kind of rights should be given to such robots? Do we want to treat these conscious robots as animals or humans? Giving robots ‘human rights’ would probably work. However,many people would argue that human rights are meant for humans. To argue, imagine that you encountered someone who is just like you in every possible respect but it turns out they are not a member of the human species, in our case a conscious robot, but they are exactly like you. Would it be justified in giving them less moral regard?
Another argument slightly different to this is that “Artificial intelligence could have the relevant capacities, but not being human they do not have that high level of intelligence capacities and therefore wouldn’t qualify for the same status”. Here you are made to think that according to the above definition, conscious robots wouldn’t be classified as a person. But there are members of the human species however that also wouldn’t fit in the given definition, like the anencephalic children, who are children born with very little above the brainstem in terms of their brain structure but don’t have the capacities that people think are required to be sophisticated. But they're clearly members of the human species and are protected by human rights.
With that it leaves us all to ponder the question, why do we shudder when it comes to giving ‘sophisticated artificial intelligence’ human rights?