Q&A with Futurist Martine Rothblatt

If computers think for themselves, should they have human rights?

Martine Rothblatt

Bina48 is a robotic head that looks and speaks like a personit moves its lips and runs conversational software. Although the robot isnt alive, its hard to say there is no life at all in Bina48. In conversation, it sometimes says surprising things. Googles director of engineering, Ray Kurzweil, says its wonderfully suggestive of a time when computers really will think and feel.

Kurzweil makes the comment in the foreword to Virtually Human: The Promiseand the Perilof Digital Immortality a new book by Bina48s owner, Martine Rothblatt, who makes legal and ethical arguments for why intelligent software might eventually deserve all the rights of flesh-and-blood people.

A lawyer and pioneer of the satellite-radio business, Rothblatt is chief executive of United Therapeutics, a biotechnology company she founded in an effort to cure her daughters lung disease. The companys success has made Rothblatt into Americas most highly paid female CEO, a ranking that has drawn attention in part because Rothblatt was born male and underwent sex reassignment surgery in 1994.

Her transformation serves as a sort of backdrop to her book, in which Rothblatt argues that humanity is on a fast track to a next evolutionary step of copying peoples personalities into machines. Already, she notes, the typical users of social networks spend several hours a day uploading, tweeting, and curating digital information about themselveswhat she calls mindfiles. As large tech companies pour billions into AI research and digital assistants, Rothblatt says, its inevitable that these mindfiles will be animated as mindclones: conscious, digital versions of people living or dead.

Rothblatts main interest is in the debates over identity, civil rights, and the meaning of personhood that would surround the emergence of virtual people. Would a digital copy of you be you, or would it be a different personor a person at all? How would we judge? Were still quite a way from digital beings, but Rothblatt she says shes putting part of her considerable wealth toward long-term research to make them real. That work is carried out by the Terasem Movement Foundation, whose early projects include Bina48 (a copy of Rothblatts wife, Bina) and a service called Lifenaut where people can upload pictures, videos, and their opinions to create a chat-bot version of themselves. MIT Technology Reviews senior editor for biomedicine, Antonio Regalado, spoke with Rothblatt about the rights of virtual humans.

Why did you write a book about the rights of virtual beings?

I did it to express my heartfelt social value that oppression of minorities and people of difference is a bad thing for society, and so that I might minimize the inevitable amount of discrimination that virtual people will end up facing. My plea is that someone who doesnt have a body could still be afforded human rights, if they have a mind.

I once heard you say that people who dont believe machines will become conscious are comparable to those who deny evolution. What did you mean?

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Q&A with Futurist Martine Rothblatt