I watched the movie Metropolis last night and this morning.  (Started it last night, finished it this morning.)  This is the anime version of the title, and it brought up some interesting questions.  The movie centers around a robot girl, Tima.  She doesn’t know, initially, that she’s a robot and she falls in love with a human boy, Kenichi.  Actually, I don’t know if “falls in love with” is the right expression.  She loves him, but it’s not clear what kind of love she feels for him.

 

The obvious question here is did Tima, by feeling love and other emotions, somehow transcend being a robot?  At this point in time, the question is academic, but it will soon move beyond that.  Artificial Intelligence research is advancing rapidly.  I have mentioned in other posts that soon there will be an artificial brain capable of thinking in ways similar to the human brain.  There is the possibility that machines may demonstrate emotions in the next couple of decades.

 

The deeper question, then, is what defines a person?  This question gets stickier and harder to question every day.  There are chimpanzees who can use sign language and communicate with humans.  It’s been demonstrated that dolphins have their own spoken language and communicate with each other regularly.  A wide variety of animals have demonstrated the ability to make and use tools.  No few of these have passed the knowledge of their tool use to their kin, again demonstrating communication skills we previously did not recognize.

 

Let’s take this from a different angle.  If a human has a serious accident which leaves their brain capable of keeping them breathing and maintaining a heartbeat but little else, many would still say they’re a person.  Even if their condition is worse, to the point where machines are keeping their body functioning, there’s more than a few folks who would say they’re still a person, even if they’re in favor of pulling the plug.  At that stage, the chimps and the dolphins are, quite simply put, more sentient than they are.

 

Going to the other end of life, there’s a few who want to define a fertilized human egg as a person.  I think that takes the definition a little far, but if that’s all it takes to be a “person” then why do so many members of the animal kingdom escape the definition?  The chimps and the dolphins are certainly more sentient than a fertilized egg.  They can be put to work, while the egg requires years of development first.

 

So the basic question of personness is a really tough one to answer.  I think it would be a grand experiment to teach a chimp child sign language, get them proficient in speech and teach them the rudimentary skills of daily human life.  Once they are fully trained adults, put them into a human job and let them earn a living.  I am willing to bet they would succeed, given the chance.  If one (or more!) did succeed, would they be given the right to vote?  Chimps mature faster than humans, but relative ages could be calculated and figured into what age they should be able to vote if given such a right.  The pundits have made it clear there are elected officials with less intelligence than monkeys.

 

And yet the question, I think, remains.  If one could train a chimp or a dolphin or any other non-human animal in the ways of the world and they then successfully integrated into it, would they be a person?  In a few decades–and I have mentioned this before–it will be possible to copy an animal’s memories and thought processes into an artificial brain.  That artificial brain can be better than what the animal started out with naturally, so it’s possible housepets could (in their new mechanical body) gain a level of sentience equal to our own.  Never mind the artificial intelligence I started this post with, this is a natural intelligence in an artificial brain.  Do we now give our former pet the status of being a person?  No few would argue our pets are already persons, although not many would argue that our pets, as they are now, should be given (for example) the right to vote.

 

When blacks were first given the right to vote in the U.S., many still were not permitted to do so in many places.  In the south particularly it was a popular notion to require people to pass a test to vote.  The test was created so that former slaves, largely uneducated, could not pass it and thus vote.  Such things are well in the past, but will we bring up a similar solution to determine whether a robot, chimp or other possible person has, in fact, achieved a level of personness to be given the rights humans give themselves?  I certainly don’t like the way the tests were used to prevent a large part of the population from exercising their rights, but how else does one determine whether a non-human is sentient enough to be equivalent, at least as far as rights are concerned, to a human?

 

The world is going through stages of freedom.  The U.S. has shown these stages, bit by bit, and its civil rights struggles have been reflected around the world.  Some countries are ahead of us, some are behind.  We got through the voting rights thing, finishing with Native Americans.  (Yes, women got the right to vote before Native Americans.)  Then we moved onto rights in general with non-whites, then women and now we’re working on gay rights.  I predict the next civil rights struggle will be over polyamorous groups.  Somewhere after that will be robots–androids if you prefer–and sentient animals.  Each successive stage will make us wonder why we fought over the previous ones.  Very few conservatives will openly argue against rights for women or non-whites these days, even though their predecessors certainly did.

 

Someday, perhaps, democracy will finally accept people of all races and species who have demonstrated by one means or another their right to be accepted as such.  For humans, that’s easy, even though there are still plenty who try to deny it.  Maybe the struggle for non-human persons’ rights will finally push our racial struggles behind us.  Maybe.