Is it free software? [LWN.net]

Is it free software?

Posted Feb 23, 2026 20:32 UTC (Mon) by draco (subscriber, #1792)
In reply to: Is it free software? by kleptog
Parent article: The Book of Remind

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 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