tales of an ordinary girl

The BBC recently published an article about The ethical delimmas of robotics.

While I think it will be a long time before we develop sentient robots, I think we're more likely to develop sentient programs first, it's interesting that the ethical debate has already begun.

Should robots have the same rights as humans if they develop sentience and should there be limitations on how they're used? Would sentient robots threaten the "specialness" of humans?

I'm not really worried about threatening the "specialness" of humans. It may cause other people issues, but to me it's a very small matter. But there is survival of a species. If robots compete with humans in a niche created for humans, then what will that do to humans and how much equality should be granted without causing harm?

I don't see how we could not grant rights to robots without making them a slave species if it came to a time when they could feel pain and emotion and wanted to make decisions for their own welfare. Regardless of whether or not they're biological, and who knows, they might be partially biological, denying a wish for self-determination is wrong.

But ethically there are a lot of gray areas and I think it will take a lot of thought and debate to draw the lines of what we should do. And then it will take a lot of re-thinking those lines and coming up with better answers.