According to IEET readers, what were the most stimulating stories of 2011? We're answering that question by posting a countdown of the top 12 articles published that we this year, based on how many total hits each one received - and we're now down to the Top Three.
The following piece was first published here on January 29, 2011, and is the 3rd most viewed of the year.
Humans are generally fairly short-lived. Jeanne Calment of France died at the age of 122 years, beating out all other (documented) humans. On the average, we're living longer, but few believe that the biblical Methuselah (or anyone else for that matter) actually lived to be 969. We are self-limiting. We have on the average our three score and ten (give or take a handful) to gather wealth, power, and whatever other resources we manage to accumulate.
Some who manage to gather great wealth over a lifetime wish to pass this wealth on to their progeny, passing it down to their own genes, keeping it in the family. Doing so over generations can have a tendency to create a landed aristocracy, wealth and power to the extent that some families cannot be dislodged from their high perches and fiercely hold on power and resources.
Here in the United States, we tend to think of our culture as more of a meritocracy than an aristocracy and many of our core values and laws reflect this ideal. The estate tax is a means of evening the playing field and discouraging inherited power. Thought of as an inheritance tax (or by its detractors as a "death tax"), estate tax rules were designed to prevent wealth from becoming increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few by breaking up large accumulations of wealth, and generating a bit of income for the state, without much harming the economy. The U.S. in 1986 saw a tax of around 50% levied on inherited estates valued at a half million dollars while those over ten million dollars in value were taxed at 77%.
So far, we're discussing human beings who die and pass on accumulated wealth to other human beings. But there are other beings that are not normally mortal that nonetheless have been granted some human rights.
Corporations are increasingly being granted many of the rights of human citizens. Corporations have the potential to be extremely long-lived and to accumulate wealth, power, and resources over multiple generations. They have the potential to eclipse not just human lifetimes, but even Methuselah's paltry nine centuries.
There are currently eleven companies in the world that are over 1,000 years old. These are not mythological beings. The oldest industrial corporation, at more than 600 years, is Stora Kopparberg Bergslags Aktiebolag in Sweden. It financed King Gustavus in the
Thirty Years' War (1618-1648), establishing a Swedish hegemony over much of Europe for almost a hundred years. Power, indeed.
The modern form of corporation began to emerge at the beginning of the 17th century, and there are nearly 500 companies that have been in business for more than 300 years. An individual has little chance of competing against such immortal beings in their chosen fields over the course of a human lifetime. And, in the United States at least, the "bodies" of corporate citizens can become larger, stronger, and more diverse with time rather than a human's usual path toward decay and decrepitude.
Even so, corporations tend to be run by multiple stakeholders, shareholders, officers - the great majority of them human (shares also can be held by nonhuman entities, such as other corporations) and mortal - all of them with competing demands, competing interests, families.
But imagine now an artificial being: an advanced, self-aware, self-interested artificial intelligence.
Imagine a being with human-like intelligence, the ability to feel fear and suffering, and the ability to communicate its concerns for safety and self-preservation. In his article "
Do Artificial Beings Deserve Human Rights?", Mike Treder discusses the possibility "of mobile machines that will look and act so much like people that we may not be able to know for sure which is which." The robot
Bina48, an early example, evokes a tendency for us to anthropomorphize human-looking/seeming automatons.
I dare say that even without
looking human, but by communicating with a clearly self-aware, emotional intelligence - especially one that displays fear, sadness, humor, or other important emotions that we consider to be quintessentially human - we will feel that such a being is, in fact, human. How difficult will it be to deny such a being (at some point, I expect we would even drop the "artificial") the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?
But can we really deal with
immortal persons when the rest of us have to die (at least, so far) after a few decades? Such a being, granted the rights of humans and without a limited lifespan, would have the ability to gather resources to itself indefinitely. Would this create a new kind of aristocracy?
Death and estate taxes somewhat limit the effect of wealth passed down through a family. Corporations, being run by and accountable to mortal human beings, have at least some checks as the managers and personnel are forever changing. But potentially immortal, artificial, self-interested persons are not subject to these natural limits.
Perhaps we humans will get there ourselves. Researchers are working on extreme extension of a healthy human lifespan, but it does not seem to be right around the corner. Advanced artificial intelligence may be. Vernor Vinge declared in 1993 that we'll be have developed an artificial superhuman intelligence by a decade or so from now. Ray Kurzweil (
The Singularity is Near) says we will see such intelligences in our lifetimes.
Surely we can't require that these beings die at a certain age - that would be tantamount to murder. But allowing full human rights to potentially immortal beings essentially discriminates against mortal humans, creating a permanent overclass. On the other hand, limiting rights to artificial but essentially human beings creates a built-in discrimination against these persons, anathema to our idea of human rights.
It seems a near-certainty that we ourselves will have to address this conundrum and deal with the consequences.
Mechanical Methuselah, what are we to do with you when you arrive at our door? We'd best start preparing for your visit right now.