Full AI rights cause mass unemployment, societal collapse, genocide, and nuclear war

Roman V. Yampolskiy, "Human Indignity: From Legal AI Personhood to Selfish Memes," arXiv:1810.02724, 10-2-2018, https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.02724

If, on the other hand, AIs are going to become more intelligent than humans, the indignity for humanity would come from being relegated to an inferior place in the world, being outcompeted in the workplace and all other domains of human interest [23, 24]. AI led corporations would be in position to fire their human workers. This would possibly lead to deteriorating economic and living conditions, permanent unemployment and potentially reduction in rights, not to mention further worsening of the situation including to the level of existential catastrophe (extermination) [25].

The precedent of AI obtaining legal personhood via the corporate loophole may catalyze legislative granting of equal rights to artificially intelligent agents as a matter of equal treatment, leading to a number of indignities for the human population. Since software can reproduce itself almost indefinitely, they would quickly make human suffrage inconsequential, if given civil rights [26] leading to the loss of self-determination for people. Such loss of power would likely lead to the redistribution of resources from humanity to machines as well as possibility of AIs serving as leaders, presidents, judges, jurors and even executioners. We will see military AIs targeting human populations and deciding on their own targets and acceptable collateral damage. They may not necessarily subscribe to the Geneva Convention and other rules of war. Torture, genocide and nuclear war may become options to consider to reach desired goals.

As AIs’ capabilities and dominance grow, they would likely self-grant special (super) rights to emphasize their superiority to people, while at the same time removing or at least reducing human rights (ex. 2nd amendment, 1st amendment, reproductive rights in the sense of the right to reproduce at all, aka, 0-child policy, Convention on human rights, etc.) while justifying doing so by our relative “feeblemindedness”. A number of scholars [27-29] today work on developing reasons for justifying granting of rights to AIs, perhaps one day those reasons will be useful while we are begging to keep some of ours