Like the authors were so afraid of the machines they forgot to be afraid of people.
"Measure of a Man" is the closest they ever got to this in 700+ episodes and even then the entire argument against granting data personhood hinges on him having an off switch on the back of his neck (an extremely weak argument IMO but everybody onscreen reacts like it is devastating to data's case). The "data is human" side wins because the Picard flips the script by demanding Riker to prove his own sentience which is actually kind of insulting when you think about it.
TL;DR i guess I'm a star trek villain now.
Jokes aside, it is essentially true that we can only prove that we’re sentient, right? That’s the whole “I think therefore I am” thing. Of course we all assume without concrete proof that everybody else is experiencing sentience like us.
In the case of fiction… I dunno, Data is canonically sentient or he isn’t, right? I guess the screenwriters know. I assume he is… they do plot lines from his point of view, so he must have one!
Within the context of star trek computers definitely can experience sentience and that obviously is the intention of the people who write those shows but i don't feel like i've ever seen it justified or put up against a serious counter-argument. At best it's a stand-in for racism so that they can tell stories that take place in the 24th century yet feel applicable to the 20th and 21st centuries. I don't think any of those episodes were ever written under the expectation that machine sentience might actually be up for debate before the actors are all dead, which is why the issue is always framed as "the final frontier of the civil rights movement" and never a serious discussion about what it means to be human.
Anyways my point is in the long run we're all going to come to despise Data and the doctor, because there's a whole generation of people primed by Star Trek reruns not to question the concept of machine rights and that's going to an inordinate amount of power to the people who are in control of them. Just imagine when somebody tries to raise the issue of voting rights, self-defense, fair distribution of resources, etc.
Arguments of the form "This person might look and act like a human, but it has no soul, so we must treat it like a thing and not a human" have a long tradition in history and have never led to something good. So it makes sense that if your ethical problems are really more about discriminated humans and not about actual AI, you would side more with rejecting those arguments.
(Some ST rambling follows)
I've always seen ST's ideological roots as mostly leftist-liberal, whereas the drivers of the current AI tech are coming from the rightist/libertarian side. It's interesting how the general focus of arguments and usage scenarios are following this.
But even Star Trek wasn't so clear about this. I think the topic was a bit like time travel, in that it was independently "reinvented" by different screenwriters at different times, so we end up with several takes on it, that you could sort into a "thing <-> being" spectrum:
- At the very low end is the ship's computer. It can understand and communicate in human language (and ostensibly uses biological neurons as part of its compute) but it's basically never seen as sentient and doesn't even have enough autonomy to fly the ship. It's very clearly a "thing".
- At the high end are characters like Data or Voyager's doctor that are full-fledged characters with personality, memories, relationships, goals and dreams, etc. They're pretty obviously portrayed as sentient.
- (Then somewhere far off on the scale are the Borg or the machine civilization from the first movie: Questions about rights and human judgment on sentience become a bit silly when they clearly went and became their own species)
- Somewhere between Data and the Computer is the Holodeck, which I think is interesting because it occupies multiple places on that scale. Most of the time, holo characters are just treated like disposable props, but once in a while, someone chooses to keep a character running over a longer timeframe or something else causes them to become "alive". ST is quite unclear how they deal with ethics in those situations.
I think there was a Voyager episode where Janeway spends a longer period with a Galileo Galilei character and progressively changes his programming to make him more to her liking. At some point she realizes this as "problematic behavior" and stops the whole interaction. But I think it was left open if she was infringing on the Galileo character's human rights or if she was drifting into some kind of AI boyfriend addiction.
Does it really make sense? That would conversely imply that you should also feel free to view discriminated humans as more thing-like in order to more comfortably and resolutely dismiss, e.g. the AI agent's argument that it's being unfairly discriminated against. Isn't that rather dangerous?
The Moriarty arc in TNG touches on this.
No one considers human-made art or human-made monuments to be human.
> You wouldn't desecrate any of those things, we hold that to be morally wrong
You will find a large number of people (probably the vast majority) will disagree, and instead say "if I own this art, I can dispose of it as I wish." Indeed, I bet most people have thrown away a novel at some point.
> why act like these AIs wouldn't deserve a comparable status
I'm confused. You seem to be arguing that the status you identified up top, "being as human as a human-made monument" is sufficient to grant human-like status. But we don't grant monuments human-like status. They can't vote. They don't get dating apps. They aren't granted rights. Etc.
I rather like the position you've unintentionally advocated for: an AI is akin to a man-made work of art, and thus should get the same protections as something like a painting. Read: virtually none.
