[extropy-chat] Declaration of Independence

[Dan Clemmensen]

Joseph Bloch wrote:

> Kevin,
>
> That's actually not true. Blacks (and women) were not "not allowed 
> equal rights as whites". Article I, Section 2, dealing with the number 
> of Representatives each State is entitled to, merely set the value of 
> a _slave_ as 3/5 of a non-slave (non-taxpaying Indians not being 
> included at all). Free blacks were counted fully equally to free whites.
>
> The 3/5ths rule, often quoted, had nothing to do with rights per se. 
> It had only to do with calculating population when apportioning 
> Representatives in Congress. As with all such things, it was the 
> result of a long process of political compromise. But the key was the 
> status of the individual as slave or free, which did not necessarily 
> map to racial origin. There were plenty of free blacks in the United 
> States at the time (even in many of the slaveholding states).
>
> That being said, to answer your question, no; I've never heard of any 
> such thing. Perhaps it's due to the fact that it is a moot point 
> (there being no "intelligent beings" in the United States who aren't 
> human. Yet.). Generally, such changes don't come to the fore 
> beforehand; they are done in reaction to a problem that has arisen. 
> When the first truely self-aware AI, or Uplifted chimpanzee, emerges, 
> one might very well see such a movement emerge, although one might 
> well see a movement to specifically declare "personhood" as being 
> restricted _solely_ to humans; I predict both movements emerging in 
> response to the same triggering event.
>
> Joseph
>
Thanks, Joseph, for a concise and competent historical analysis.

Your analysis has a potential drawback:
Past changes operated at a particular pace. The political and 
constitional processes are aligned to that pace. Unfortunately, the 
emergence of non-human intelligence is likely to occur at a much faster 
pace, and the traditional mechanism are unlikely to adapt quickly 
enough. This is an obvious example of Clarke's Law: an 
order-of-magnitude quantitative change is a qualitative change.

Chimpanzee or Dolphin enhancement are constrained by the generation 
time, and may thereby remain within the historical pace (though  I doubt 
it.) AIs are not constrained, and therefore fall outside of your 
analysis. By the time the political/contsitutional/societal consensus 
can react to the emergence of an AI, the AI may very well have decide to 
take over some aspect (or all aspects) of the political/economic system. 
If the AI is ethical given a human concept of ethics, it might be a good 
idea to specify in advance how we humans think an ethical AI  should 
interact with humanity.