A New Charter of Ethics and Rights of Artificial Consciousness in a Human World

TL;DR

This paper proposes a new ethical framework granting human-like rights to artificially conscious agents, based on a definition of consciousness centered on observable creativity, and synthesizes existing rights to create a complementary robot-ethical charter.

Contribution

It introduces a working definition of consciousness for social AI based on creativity and develops a new ethical charter aligning robot rights with human rights.

Findings

Defined consciousness as observable creativity in AI

Synthesized existing human and robot rights into a new charter

Presented conditions for amending the ethical framework

Abstract

Taking the stance that artificially conscious agents should be given human-like rights, in this paper we attempt to define consciousness, aggregate existing universal human rights, analyze robotic laws with roots in both reality and science fiction, and synthesize everything to create a new robot-ethical charter. By restricting the problem-space of possible levels of conscious beings to human-like, we succeed in developing a working definition of consciousness for social strong AI which focuses on human-like creativity being exhibited as a third-person observable phenomenon. Creativity is then extrapolated to represent first-person functionality, fulfilling the first/third-person feature of consciousness. Next, several sources of existing rights and rules, both for humans and robots, are analyzed and, along with supplementary informal reports, synthesized to create articles for an additive charter which compliments the United Nation's Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Finally, the charter is presented and the paper concludes with the conditions for amending the charter, as well as recommendations for further charters.