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Well, as most of you know, of course they are, and we have seen it since yesterday, in fact,

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there are never any debates about the question of who or what has small standing amongst small philosophers.

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And in fact, all celebration is of varied persuasions in recent time times.

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I think much of this has been triggered by political arguments over the rights or lack thereof of non-human sentient animals as well,

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of course, as questions about human foetuses and embryos.

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Proponents of the view that sentence non-human animals have defensible more rights rights claims defend their stance,

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typically, but arguing that these animals can be wrong,

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morally relevant ways by moral agents like ourselves because they have interests that are the results of certain capacities like our own.

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So typically then what motivates rights claims and claims of moral standing are particular capacities for animals that are like ours.

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And given that it's only fair to treat like a like or to give equal consideration to something that is relevantly equal,

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it's defensible to argue that, for instance, sentient animals should be treated in a manner that is comparable to sentient humans,

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at least as far as infliction of pain and suffering is concerned.

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So everything hinges here, then on a non-human entity having capacities that are comparable to our own.

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The idea, essentially is this I can experience pain,

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which typically the suffering a given sentient non-human animal has the same capacity or similar capacity.

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It responds, in fact, to pain inducing stimuli in a manner similar to how I would respond.

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I assume, like humans like me, prefer to avoid pain and suffering.

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So the assumption is that essential non-human animals responds to pain inducing stimuli like us.

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To try to avoid them suggests that like us, they prefer not to experience that.

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So the infliction of pain and suffering then on these sentient non-human animals appears not to be a more useful activity.

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And so seeing that because it inflicts pain and suffering on them and so results in us harming them if we do so regardless.

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Based on the variety of this argument, many has cut moral standing to send in non-human animals.

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But why does it matter really who we ascribe moral standing to?

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And I think you might be able to get a good indication of the significance of the answers

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to these kinds of questions by undertaking a search on your favourite online search engine,

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such as, for instance, Google Scholar. A lot of people have a lot of different ideas about the question of who or what's moral standing.

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So what I wanted to start off with was just to clear a little bit of ground because in my own mind,

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when I started writing this to explain how I understand moral standing,

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it seems to me at least, and this is not tied to controversial what I'm saying here.

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Whoever has the moral standing is somebody who can be morally wrong for actions undertaken by moral agents.

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And moral agent is someone who has the capacity to distinguish between what is morally right and what is morally wrong.

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So if you have moral standing animal agents, agents, my actions affecting you can be morally right or wrong or neutral.

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If something has no moral standing, whatever it is that I do or don't do to it, that affects it, has no moral implications.

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So. If we agree, then, that a stone has no moral standing, me kicking the stone along the road is small,

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inconsequential at least as far as a stone and as far as the universe is concerned.

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So if you think then that non-human animals or people with certain disabilities or androids have no moral standing,

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your treatment of them, whatever you might choose to do or not to do would all other things being equal and morally neutral activity.

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L.A. County has suggested that we should distinguish between wild status and moral standing.

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Between saying that something is not standing simply means that it counts more in its own right.

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However, the moral status of entities that have more standing might not necessarily be the same.

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And then when we can get into these hierarchies, if you want to, you know that people have discussed here and is probably in line with the kind of

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hierarchy of ranking that Ruth and Tom try to get worked out by means of a large grant.

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Now, some beings with more standing might have a higher or lower moral status than others other beings, swift also moral standing and in brackets.

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As far as I can see again, this depends entirely on how they relate to our own capacities.

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Nothing else comes. It just happened. It doesn't happen in our universe of analysis,

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so we can then if any number of arguments about the normative grounds on which we could base such rankings.

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But it's not unheard of in your philosophy that sentient persons are seen as having a higher status than central non-person.

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Why is that? Because they are paradigmatic human beings. They are like us.

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And of course, as Sarah explained in response to Michael's question yesterday,

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they had to be on the top of our pecking order off the greasy pole of moral status.

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And that seems no surprise to me, I think, to align with one's intuition, said many of us share, because this approach could,

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for instance, lead us to grant sentience, non-human animals, small standing and moral status conceding.

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This would still permit us then, as we have seen here, to disagree vigorously about the question of whether a non-human animal small status should be

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the same as that of a human being with similar intellectual capacities so that if a person,

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what seems uncontroversial to Buchanan is that more statist admits of degrees.

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Ann Warren in her book on moral status obligations to Person, other living things, on the other hand,

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seems to propose that we should use more status and more standing interchangeably

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because to have more status is to be morally considerable or to have moral standing.

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And yet she still finds herself in the business of wanting to create pecking orders.

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And so in fact, us, when similar to sentiment, is both a necessary and sufficient condition for establishing moral status.

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Status comes in degrees depending on the being's capacity for sentience, so flies would find themselves lower in the pecking order than picks.

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And if you ask me to join the camp, I would probably get a membership card for summer camp.

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But of course, what personhood should Trump sentence?

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It's never quite clear, except when we realise that those who make those determinations of people who happen to be also persons.

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So it probably can't hurt, then to place oneself on top of whatever pecking order one creates.

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We are very good at that. Now if we take the debate about centre non-human animals as our starting point.

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It becomes clear that many of the arguments about moral standing, as well as some old status as strongly,

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if not entirely, on drawing parallels from human capacities and needs that we have.

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To those of central non-human animals who seem to have comparable, if not identical, needs,

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the content of the small standing is inconceivable without us humans having experienced something that demands particular consideration of our needs,

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and we grant the existence of those needs to sentence non-human animals that seem to have similar needs.

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Them all standing, in other words, depends entirely on our experience of world that would be otherwise irrelevant.

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We would have nothing to go by it. If you look at them, evaluate nothing at all.

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But you think about it. Most of us are typically not at all concerned about the most tending of animals objects such as stones and rocks.

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And I wonder whether that is not indicative of our failure to imagine anything that is not somehow somewhat like us and our experience of the world.

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David Hume was right, of course, on moral feelings, as he put it, make up the essential and instinctive foundations of our morality.

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But that's an issue I want to return to in just a moment.

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Let's talk about what I think of the easy bits. When you think about cameras, for instance,

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there's been some exciting reporting recently about the injection of reprogrammed human

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derived stem cells from patients with Parkinson's disease into the brains of monkeys.

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Concerns have been raised on the one hand, but the well, dissected ethics.

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Sorry about the work dissected ethics of animal experimentation involving monkeys.

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Invariably, if one is opposed to the creation and use of monkeys for research purposes, one would be opposed to such projects.

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However, arguments also began evolving around the question of whether the insertion of human cells into these

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monkeys brains should be seen as meaningfully impacting on the moral status of these non-human animals.

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So if we had packed them all standing at, say, sixty seven or a hundred or five billion, however many trillion,

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whatever you want to put it, but say we put that 67 out of 100 for the sake of the argument, 100 being,

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of course,

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a paradigmatic human person based on their being sentient beings with limited intellectual capacities within the insertion of those human cells,

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move them higher up on the greasy pole of moral status. Would they be more human as a result of this, and so move up to more status pecking order?

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Procurement cameras have also been produced with a view to creating organisms that can be utilised for organ transplantation purposes as before,

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some of you opposed to the use of central non-humans as involuntary spare organ banks for human purposes.

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And the question arises, of course,

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at what point in time the human camera might be transformed into a human pig camera and whether eventually it might turn into a human,

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depending on how far we might be able to advance such development projects.

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What's what's with such changes impact meaningfully on the entities, small state standing or status, and bioethicists have worked their way, I think,

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successfully through standard ethical objections to creating such chimaeras,

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debating the supposed unnatural oddness of the procedures leading to chimaeras.

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There were endless varieties of slippery slope arguments along Frankenstein scenarios,

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concerns about violations of species integrity and if all else fails that bioethical all time classic free for all human dignity.

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So it seems to me as if arguments about the moral status and moral standing of such chimaeras are not terribly complicated to settle.

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Well, on positions developed in the context of the animal rights debate so applicable here,

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and David in particular has nicely described the thing and analysed in his book Taking Animals Seriously the

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relevant market events that we could look at and look up in this context from those reception consciousness,

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pain, distress, fear, anxiety, suffering, pleasure, enjoyment, happiness, desires, concepts, beliefs and so on and so forth.

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Now, while there's no consensus over the question of which of these market events is the relevant relevant one,

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I'm talking like the weird accent at the moment. I apologise.

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So while there is no consensus over the question of which of these macro events is the relevant one, what is it today,

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or whether a single with a single one of these events constitutes a Trump type inflexion point from which everything changes?

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The arguments are, well, familiar. Only two species is really the question of when cameras are sufficiently close to our

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species that they should have full moral status cause some headaches to sentient.

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It's like some look like when summer, for instance, that you have to University of Toronto.

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That is an irrelevant consideration. Two defenders of a subject of a life standard like Tom Regan.

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This would also be an irrelevance in any case. I think that with the exception of species whose stance I think is implausible,

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there's little that can be said beyond the well-established arguments from the animal rights debates in this context.

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People agree on criteria that can be defended even if we hold divergent views on which of these criteria we consider to be the right ones.

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What these criteria have in common, however,

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is that their starting point is some arguably physiological equivalency to a parrot to a paradigmatic human's capacities.

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It doesn't matter, then, whether you settle for Bentham single sentient ism or Regan's more complex subject of a life criterion,

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both standards are inconceivable without the human condition that gave rise to them.

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The starting point was us, our ability to experience pain and suffer our disposition or capacity to be subjects of our lives and so on and so forth.

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So, yeah, so this approach works well with regard to whatever kind of entity that possesses,

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arguably the ability to experience experiences like paradigmatic humans to know the older folks amongst us might recall data.

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Data is a fictional character in the science fiction series Star Trek.

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Data is a highly sophisticated android with human like characteristics, including strangely having a sex data the machine.

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But hopefully at least this data, I'm not so certain anymore, but hopefully uncontroversial data is male.

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In various episodes of the series seems to regret its inability to experience emotions, including joy.

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But regret, in fact, might be too strong a label. It's more like a serious befuddlement.

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In the feature film Star Trek First Contact, if you have well, I hope you have seen it,

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if not, just assume there was this movie called Star Trek First Contact. There's this evil ball queen, but some of you are smiling at the rest.

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I'm lost. I lost you. Probably in any case. So, so in this feature film Star Trek first contact the evil box office data what he desires.

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She reconfigures the Android so that he also experiences emotions as well as sensation skin crops are thrown in for good measure.

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So this takes us, of course,

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then to the challenging ethical question about the moral standing and status of potential future artificial intelligence entities created by us,

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or potentially at some point created by themselves. That might display characteristics and behaviours similar to our own data, for instance,

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has a line in one of the serious episodes where he says, and I quote, I quote data.

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No kidding.

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I chose to believe that I was a person and that I had the potential to become more than a collection of circuits and sub processors, unquote.

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The right post in this episode is delivered by Beverly Crusher in brackets.

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If you don't know how she discussed starships doctor and she says Commander Data,

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the Android who sits yet ops operations dreams of being human, but he never gets the punchline to a joke, unquote.

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So what? He failed as the upgraded data to relay to humans and so satisfy Rob Sparrow, about whom we will hear more in just a moment.

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And so satisfy Sparrow, about whom in just a moment, everything changed in terms of his small status and more standing after that was done.

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Once he had the emotion chip installed and the skin graft that permitted him to feel sensation.

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He really was like us in more irrelevant, relevant weighs. What is it but relevant anyway?

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His status arguably should have been picked somewhere above us due to his superior analytical skills and speed, as well as his bodily strength.

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And that perhaps was the Star Trek writer's answer to the question of what constitutes consciousness.

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Now, the troubling thing about post-war queen data is that we still had to take at face value his expressions of anxiety,

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stress, fear and so on and so forth. But we didn't know, not in a serious and we really we could never know really how the skin grafts,

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how the skin graft, emotion, shape and his Android hardware actually interacted.

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Was that really the same as us experiencing anxiety, stress, fear and so on and so forth?

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Thankfully, until today, there are no androids developed anywhere near to a level with a data like scenario would even occur as a serious question.

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However, if we ever reached a stage where creatures like Cylons cybernetic life.

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Lifeform notes silence could become a reality.

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That is a debate the moral standing or status of bioengineered hybrids of humans and machines.

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This empirical question would pose a very chilling, very serious challenges challenge to address indeed.

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And the main reason for this is that we typically take expressions of pain, suffering and happiness at face value.

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We can never know, ultimately, with a someone who expresses pain, suffering or happiness actually experiences any of those.

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One of the first things that medical students are taught us to believe that patients when they claim that they are in pain.

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This is so because despite a few gotcha strategies, we have no means to investigate the veracity of such patients claims.

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We act on our own experience of those feelings and assume that someone who is physiologically close to us can experience the same so existing,

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I think the analysis then unless they are specious and I would put it to you that there's still a species,

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even if you attention to them, because there's nothing else. If we do that, we can do probably rely on the truth of those assumptions.

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So I think it's not too far fetched, then,

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to grant the truth of such assumptions with regard to being set on vital respects like us as biological cameras could arguably be.

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But where would that leave data Android's human hybrids? And my response to this?

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Would be that we would need to do to research empirical questions of whether data claims,

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whether what data claims he feels is something that he actually feels in a manner that is similar to us,

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at least we have something we could compare under those circumstances.

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If the answer to the question then is yes, we can deploy our established modes of ethical analysis to address questions of moral status standing.

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But perhaps more importantly, questions of our moral obligations.

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So I'm very grateful to Ruth and Tom for working this out for us doing the grand project because I'm genuinely curious in brackets.

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I don't know whether it's possible actually to get these answers at all, but you know.

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Well, let's assume the answer is no. Or quite possibly, maybe. Where would that leave us?

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And here's what I think of the the more difficult bits, self-learning artificial intelligence machines like androids, for instance,

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there's quite a bit of literature that exists on the ethical implications of

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creating and eventually interacting with self-learning artificial intelligence.

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And let me not in passing at least,

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that I'm somewhat less excited about the challenges these machines cause in terms of their moral status and standing,

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even though these questions are fascinating.

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I'm much more anxious as a science fiction fan and with with reference to Terminator, Battlestar Galactica and Star Trek, certainly,

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I'm much more concerned about the question of whether they will eventually consider us humanoids as imperfect to be eradicated carbon based lifeforms,

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as Voyager pointed out.

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And it's a prop in Star Trek or having us having moral status and as deserving to survive when machines eventually will take over.

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Now, you might recall that the Cylons, both in the 2003 mini series as well as the 2004 Battlestar Galactica movie, were sort of a sinful and flawed.

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And to be eradicated. Now, these are religiously fanatic machines, but there was still crazy.

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In any case, the question of moral status and moral standing seems quite significantly more difficult vis a vis self-learning,

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artificially intelligent machines such as, for instance, androids like the pre upgrade data who didn't have the emotional chip.

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So for the purpose of this, I would henceforth refer to androids, but please interpret this as any kind of self-learning artificial intelligence

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machine that does not have the uncontroversial physiologic capacity to feel pain.

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It doesn't have it because unlike post upgrade data and unlike the humanoid Cylons,

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there is no biological component that could give rise to the kind of pain and

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suffering as we understand it when we consider how mammals or equivalent lifeforms.

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So what would be the situation because of intelligence, a similar event of personhood?

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Rob Sparrow Some of you might be familiar with his work.

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His book admonished Citizen here, OK? He has argued years ago, when I didn't even think about any of these issues,

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he has argued for Turing trials type tests to assist us in determining whether an artificial intelligence possesses moral standing.

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Now, as we have said, I think Walter did it. The original Turing test, of course, had a different function here.

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The objective was simply to test with an Android could manage to talk in such a way that a human unaware

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that they were talking to the Android could be fooled into thinking that they were talking to it,

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that they were talking or conversing with a fellow adult human.

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Turing was in no doubt in his days already that machines eventually would be able to succeed on that

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frontier and indeed an artificial intelligence machine reportedly successfully prosecuting tests in 2014.

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No, Spiros, cybersecurity security trial type test is somewhat different that he proposes you propose instead,

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and I quote a test for when computers have a chief moral standing by asking when a computer might take the place of a human being in a moral dilemma,

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such as a trial situation in which a choice must be made as to which of two human lives to save.

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We will know, he says, that machines have achieved moral standing comparable to a human when the replacement of one

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of these people with an artificial intelligence leaves the character of the dilemma intact,

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unquote. And Sparrow has little doubt. If we decide that more personhood is only a matter of cognitive skills,

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it's just a matter of time until artificial intelligence attains moral standing.

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I think he's right there. Spare us spare and instead is defending an account of moral standing, where for a machine to pass a Turing test.

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It must be capable of being the object of iMore's grief and sympathy,

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a small emotion such as these are partially constitutive of our concept of a person, he says.

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Then he goes on, but I claim machines are not appropriate surprises Robespierre, after all.

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But I claim machines are not appropriate objects of these responses because they incapable of achieving the individual personality too much,

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which they are oriented unquote.

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So it seems to me that that mould standing for Spiro and targets crucially being part of a network of others like like us,

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with whom we socially interact like, for instance, in the African philosophy of Ubuntu and machines is right up to a point.

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Today, any case would have some difficulty passing such a test. He eventually admits that his analysis points down to something more trivial.

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It goes back to our intuitions about what such machines can and can't do,

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as opposed to what what they might at a certain point in time the de facto can't or can do.

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He writes. We cannot seriously hold. The machines have thoughts of feeling in a life because a radical.

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Inevitably arises as to whether they really feel what they appear to.

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And that's the crux of it. Will never know. Probably, and could not.

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A card would have offered similar thoughtful thoughts vis-a-vis non-human higher mammals.

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In his days, Descartes was clearly wrong. The jury's out there on Sparrow.

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Time will tell. If I had to place a bet, I would bet that Sparrow would eventually be proven wrong to.

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I'm sceptical that special social relationship strategy is helpful.

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It encounters problems of the same kind that we are familiar with from the animal rights debates.

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There will be humans who are unable or unwilling to reciprocate socially in social relationships or to participate in such relationships.

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Surely, their moral standing and old status cannot be contingent on their recognition by others.

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Why should someone small standing depend on whether they succeed in becoming the object of our remorse, grief or sympathy or sympathy?

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If we have learnt anything from the court's failure to recognise animal pain and animal suffering,

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it's this we are as a species, not sophisticated enough to do justice,

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even to others who are in fact uncontroversial like us in morally rather than face ways, let alone to others who are very much unlike us.

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So leaving aside relational approaches to mould status or moral standing,

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it seems to me that two questions arise, one of which seems to be empirical in nature.

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The other one in normative in nature will give answers to both of these questions.

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I think both of my answers are pretty crappy, and I'm kind of curious whether you have better answers.

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So the empirical question is this with androids express the experience of pain and suffering happiness and misery.

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What what they actually experience, if anything.

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Is it comparable to to what we would experience, is it comparable to what, say, higher non-human mammals might experience?

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In case you are able to defend an affirmative answer to these questions,

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you would be able to deploy the same type of analysis that we have been going over and over again since yesterday here.

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And so we would be able actually to to to make sense of this in terms of ethical analysis and in some sense,

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this would be good news given that it's well-trodden territory. He would be able to bring to bear a sophisticated ethical frameworks to this question.

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And as alluded to this already in the in the section on chimaeras, the trouble is, of course, we can't.

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You do not have the means to make a definite determination and spare us answers quite revealing again in the end, like us.

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Therefore, it ain't happening. He might be right today. He might be wrong tomorrow.

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And this takes me to the other question. I think it's crucial and it's normative.

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What if the empirical question is answered in the negative, like it's not like us?

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We have no evidence that there is real pain. We have no evidence that there is we are suffering.

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We have no evidence that there's real regret, no matter what they tell us.

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Would that give us more licence to discard than Android's expression of suffering?

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And we should finally address the elephant in the room, is it normatively defensible to reduce answers to the question about moral status and

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more standing to essentially criteria that look exclusively at the human experience?

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And it's good everything that falls outside the realm of for moral consideration, as we are doing so far.

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And that's pretty much a Spurs response. But the same was true, of course, percentage isn't based approaches and it falls short.

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I think of what the Somalia requires. It doesn't take us long to realise that our current strategy to make us the

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standard of value if you evaluating anything else is difficult to defend and.

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Bear with me, if I come up one more time with a science fiction example.

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So imagine there's an extraterrestrial species visiting us, it's not completely out of the possibility it might happen at some point.

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So they visit us, leaving that spaceship to make particular requests vis-a-vis their accommodation.

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They request a particular low temperature and they require a large and as energy source to regenerate during and after our meetings.

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As hosts, we are provided by them with the necessary specifications for the hardware.

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They also kind of eventually provide us with some hot because our adaptors apparently are incompatible.

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Eventually they leave their spaceship. Well, the materials in our meeting room bring you long down energy source to ensure they have sufficient

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regeneration capability until their bodies and our energy sources have to be made compatible.

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Our service androids provide the human species representative for subsequent systems doing the meeting.

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This quickly an exchange of information occurring between the extraterrestrials and our service androids.

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The extraterrestrials, much like European politicians, would do in business meetings with Chinese counterparts,

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bring up the issue of Android rights and based on what they gathered from our androids,

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what they perceived to be abuse and discriminatory conduct by humans towards those

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machines because we have made already our determination that none of that counts.

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Essentially, their charge is extraterrestrials that we had ignored unfairly the androids demands for reliable energy supply,

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the appropriate temperature and worse time repairs both in their work and the out-of-service environment.

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So it is true that androids did complain about these three issues and about the temperature in particular to us,

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but we were very quick to reject those complaints on the grounds that androids cannot suffer as far as they were.

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As far as we or they were concerned, the androids were faking it and the at sparrows were quite approvingly, apparently.

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It was also cheaper to do so. And in this future, society capitalism still reigns.

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So the extraterrestrials wouldn't accept any of these explanations. They can't experience pain or suffering or happiness.

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They bring up the example of cheap labour that they have imparted to their homeworld.

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These biological organisms are in fact not dissimilar to us in that they require sustenance, rest the ascension, but our definition of sentience.

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And while the extraterrestrials can't experience any of these things,

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they did listen to the complaints that they received when the first cohort of workers got weaker and weaker due to the lack of available food.

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They realised quickly that their standards of well-being are quite different to that of those labourers.

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And they realised that they could not apply their own standards of well-being to them. Their needs were different.

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No, I grant you, of course, that this is all completely made up as far fetched as far as hypotheticals go.

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But I do think that it goes to show maybe that our strategy to using our own experience that we are

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familiar with as the gold and the only standard might be impossible to defend when it's challenged.

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Different beings would have different needs, so as far as they're more standing on what status is concerned, any attempt at making a determination.

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Should be unique and different to vet. That we deployed in the case of non-human animals,

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insofar as there doesn't have to be biological material directly involved in the production of artificial intelligence machines.

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And yet the show disposition capacities that seem comparable,

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if not identical to some human disposition capacities that typically give rise to claims about mould status and moral standing.

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So part of the difficulty we face will undoubtedly be to answer the question of whether hypothetical human ascension being like responses

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to a particular stimuli in an artificial intelligence entity are morally equivalent to the responses given by beings that we know well,

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that we know that we think we know are physiologically capable of having such experiences and if they are not.

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Well, that was, give us more licence to ignore them. So let me wrap this up by talking briefly about the secret lives of stones.

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An obvious response to to my hypothetical is that there are no such extraterrestrials.

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There's no evidence that there are beings who can be wrong too or not at a minimum, sentient.

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It's all nice and well to go on, harping about the ball screen and data or silence when they also do not exist.

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And I concede that I'm not proposing that we grant rights to particular operating environments or treatments to current androids.

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But that is only because they have not yet reached the stage of sophistication when that seems warranted in a way they are like, Stone said.

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We kicked down the road like milkshakes plotted. Protesters shared with another.

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For us, the reason why we do not grant rocks and stones, particular a particular right to be left alone that is lying forever.

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Where they are is perhaps not only because they have no interest that we can wrap our heads around for the reasons that I mentioned,

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but also because they have never made any effort to communicate their violated or threatened interests.

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So to be fair to those who think that I'm too conservative, that we should go further,

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there are in fact precedents supporting supportive of their stance already in our legal systems.

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To give you an example, we create legal rights today not only to persons and also persons like corporations,

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for instance, but also include things like reverse.

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For instance, some of you will be familiar with the Wanganui River in New Zealand, which has been granted the same rights as persons.

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It must be treated by law as a living entity,

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even though clearly it is not going to say clearly it is not based on what we know and who might be mistaken.

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The reason for this is that the Maori hold a worldview where the river is considered a living entity with valid moral claims and valid moral standing,

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and ultimately the political campaign succeeded. This is what happened.

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No, I think of rivers as ecosystems with instrumental value that should give rise to certain protections.

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But unless one subscribes to world view that William Franklin has described as a holistic environmental ethic where everything somehow counts,

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it would not be because it deserves those protections in its own right. That is in the absence of it being of instrumental value.

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Interestingly enough, this holistic ethic fits to address our standard lifeboat example, and you can just think about it.

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Say if in this example, where basically everything in the in the environment somehow matters has some standing

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say you have five million cancer cells in one person with cancer who matters more,

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how do you quantify that? There's nothing at all in this. I think that that would answer this question.

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But what about the future? What about future post upgrade data equivalent androids?

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My view would be this unlike Spiro,

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I would not want to eliminate such a possibility of vested interests that are specific to future sophisticated androids,

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but accountant visitors beyond hypotheticals that have currently at least no relation whatsoever to reality.

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Far fetched as the hypothetical with the visiting extraterrestrial was, it points us to something that might be relevant,

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though if there is a sophisticated Android, say, a machine with no biologic components at all, that feels wrong but wrong our treatment of it.

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You will need some evidence or argument from it or from a proxy. Defending it that shows evidence in support of the violated interest or harm claims.

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It's easier, I think, for us to investigate claims of harm if there's a biological being that is somewhat familiar to us.

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It's harder, if not impossible, for us to investigate such claims.

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If there's no biological component that offers us a chance to compare like with like and draw conclusions from that.

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So I think it's not unreasonable to place the onus on something that claims rights for itself and the claimant or the human proxy,

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as has been the case with non-human animals or the river in New Zealand.

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In our history, at least, rights activism ultimately led to resolve societal change, whether it was for people who were held as slaves,

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women, queer people or animals, they met their case or we made their case, depending on how you want to read this.

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We made our case sometimes by deploying militant means, and we succeeded. At a minimum, I would expect androids to make their case.

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To stake their claim. No one could object that androids might not have the capacity to do so themselves.

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And again, I think the case of the Wanganui River is illuminating the case that was brought by the Maori people acting on the river's behalf.

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So one could easily imagine human proxies representing the androids to.

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So the Animal Liberation, the Android Liberation Front, or something like that.

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I don't think it's unreasonable to say that if something that might have justifiable

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moral claims against mall agents is unable to communicate those claims,

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and these claims are so significantly different to what we know today that we can't imagine them.

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We are not quite blameworthy for not recognising our failings. And this seems a reasonable response, maybe not to me,

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it looks like a reasonable response to the conundrum of wanting to do justice to something that might be,

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but that we haven't seen yet, and that would be very different to us.

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It's also easier than to conjure up justifications for interests that would be significantly different to our own and that it's not impossible,

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in fact, to conceptualise such claims today. In the meantime, what I think is worth reconsidering, you know what,

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I think it's worth reconsidering some of the sentiment isn't a person, not a variations of them really should be the only games in town.

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And I have no answer. By the way, it's not a rhetorical question I would not be able to say yes or no, I'm just uncertain at this stage.

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It's all science fiction does give a surprisingly rich fodder for analysis, and it might prepare us for things to come.

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So thanks very much for your time.