Is it free software? [LWN.net]

Is it free software?

Posted Feb 21, 2026 23:24 UTC (Sat) by turistu (guest, #164830)
In reply to: Is it free software? by draco
Parent article: The Book of Remind

> I think there's a legitimate philosophical question whether it's ok to delete a true artificial intelligence once you've created it, since that's the equivalent of killing it.

There's nothing "philosophical" about that kind of nonsense.

Only people have rights, and they keep having all their rights no matter how stupid, feckless, machine-like repetitive, unimaginative and worthless they appear. Bots, corporations or other software or hardware contraptions have no rights.

Assuming that someone was ever able to build an intelligent machine which was not reproducible, you could have an argument for protecting it from deleting/"killing" it in the same way historical buildings, paintings, old books or pieces of tapestry are. Not in the same way people are.

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Is it free software?

Posted Feb 23, 2026 13:01 UTC (Mon) by kleptog (subscriber, #1183) [Link] (5 responses)

> Only people have rights, ...

It's philosophical because that statement is a belief that you have. There is a school of thought called anthropocentrism that believes this. But there are alternatives, many people believe that animals also have rights (e.g. protection from cruelty by humans).

You may not agree with it, but denying the existence of other viewpoints is pretty extreme.

For the time being whether an AGI would have rights is philosophical because the actual existence of an AGI hasn't happened yet.

Is it free software?

Posted Feb 23, 2026 20:32 UTC (Mon) by draco (subscriber, #1792) [Link] (4 responses)

I wasn't even thinking that far in my comment (regarding animals having some rights).

If intelligent aliens came to visit us in spaceships, would they not be [non-human] people too? They wouldn't share our genes, but they would be intelligent.

Is that enough? I'm pretty sure a lot of people would automatically assume so.

So...if we make machines as intelligent as that (or us), what about them?

Like you said, this is all hypothetical right now, since intelligent machines don't exist yet, no matter what the LLM boosters say. But eventually we'll figure out how to make them, and if we don't have good answers for these questions when that happens, we're frankly idiots considering the considerable media discussing the possibility (and consequences for ignoring the questions).

From what I've seen the last few years...I don't have high hopes. :-/

Is it free software?

Posted Feb 23, 2026 22:17 UTC (Mon) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

> From what I've seen the last few years...I don't have high hopes. :-/

From what I've seen in the last few years, I have very "low" hopes of our ability to create anything remotely intelligent :-)

I don't think we'll have any problems with philosophical problems of deleting AIs at the moment :-)

Cheers,
Wol

Is it free software?

Posted Feb 23, 2026 23:46 UTC (Mon) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link]

We already recognize the idea of legal persons who aren't natural human beings, like corporations, so it wouldn't be a stretch to grant personhood to other things. Of course this is making the huge category mistake of behaving as if there is only one legal system with a single set of well established rights. Each country has its own legal system, so it's completely possible that different places would recognize AGI (or extraterrestrial beings) differently.

Is it free software?

Posted Feb 24, 2026 14:52 UTC (Tue) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (1 responses)

> They wouldn't share our genes,

.... or would they?

;)

Asimov's robots series tackles robot sentience and equality in at least 1 story - "Bicentennial Man". The story won a SF writing award. Also made into a film. Some love it, some don't - bit sickly sweat at the end, but it's good IMO.

Is it free software?

Posted Feb 24, 2026 15:12 UTC (Tue) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

Or E.E. (Doc) Smith and the Lensman series. The Arisians, whether by design or accident, seeded the galaxy with "human-ness", so when the galactic collision occurred that filled both galaxies with planets happened, they mostly got seeded with Arisian-like life.

(Yes I know much of the science in the Lensman series is now known to be rubbish, but as Doc Smith said, he did his best not to break any of the scientific laws that were known/understood at the time. Much of his imagination has not withstood the march of Science :-)

Cheers,
Wol