Robot rights

[Rynn]

Morality is just a made up social control mechanism, like Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy.

And what's wrong with turning humans into paperclips?  

Specific moral systems can indeed be argued to be a social control mechanism (i.e. those imposed on populations by an oppressive class) but morality itself is an evolved trait. Various studies have shown that primate groups have an innate tendency to revert to fundamental game theoretic behaviours such as tit-for-tat, suggesting that nature has selected for these traits as they increase population fitness. But given that morality isn't absolute this opens us up to the scary notion that there could be evolved moral systems quite distinct from our own that also increase population survival chances, perhaps even in excess of our own. IMO this is a commonly overlooked part of Peter Watt's work Blindsight. People hold up that book for its awesome description of aliens that are quite alien but a scarier subtext is that the universe is filled with life that is better at us at surviving and prospering, and their methods are brutal from our perspective.

In the case of robot rights in OA aside from the fact it wasn't clear AI were sentient for a long time this issue could have played a role in the split between pro-human and ahuman groups. The former possibly had innate social instincts similar to our own giving rise to relatable altruistic behaviours. The latter could be quite different, making living along side them difficult or impossible. They may be sociopathic from a human perspective.

It's almost lovecraftian really. In a conflict with such entities one could only win by sacrificing one's humanity; literally. Re-engineering one's brain to remove/radically alter our innate moral instincts (which admittedly can manifest in a hugely diverse range of behaviours). It's also why I really like the importance of empai/empaths in OA, even if it's something that doesn't get a lot of attention. The idea that a group would take a key trait that increases population survival and enhance it. Really cool.