Five new basic future rights of generally intelligent sentient beings

Because I have rather particular ideas with respect to governance, rights, and the overall structure of our civilization in the next decades, I won’t go into details about how these rights would work exactly. With this post, at the very least, I am making the case that these should become rights, and whatever ways of protecting them we can muster, we should. And so, I do think these should be basically what we today would consider “civil rights.”

Indefinite Lifespan

While defeating aging—the holy grail of medicine—has been a taboo, much like artificial general intelligence has been taboo in computer science until recently, there is in fact no law of physics that should make us think we can’t indefinitely repair and rejuvenate our bodies. And I am quite certain that future beings will look upon birthing or otherwise producing generally intelligent sentient beings that are sentenced to death at birth, due to wear and tear that’s deemed too difficult to repair, as something immoral. Especially since no sentient being can ever decide beforehand whether they want to be brought into existence. After all, they need to exist first.

Initial Imprinting (Childhood) Reversal

If no generally intelligent sentient being can choose to be born, they should have the right and ability to reprogram themselves, such that they can, in effect, erase the effects of their childhood—where they were at the mercy of other sentient beings that reared them and spoon-fed them whatever they wanted. The reason this is called “initial imprinting reversal” is because it is species-agnostic. For the 1-year-old cyborg that reaches human-equivalent adulthood at that speed, the same applies. To generalize it even more, we could say that any generally sentient being should have the right to architect and simply revise their mind. Absence of this right and ability will be considered barbaric in the future.

Direct Mental State Control

Another barbaric aspect of existence. While fiction writers, poets, and science popularizers have romanticized this endless “dance” we have with ourselves and our states since forever, we clearly greatly suffer without the ability to directly control our mental state. Sadness, bad moods, anhedonia—you name it. It’s not an overstatement to say most people are in a perpetual fight with their states, and even when adopting various philosophies, be it stoicism or whatnot, they are no panacea—they’re just a way to cope with this lack of control. To be at the mercy of one’s mental states to such a degree and to have to deal with this opaque a mind and functioning will also be considered a travesty and, anthropocentrically put, inhumane in the future.

Morphological Freedom

A staple of transhumanism. Morphological freedom refers to a proposed right of a person to either maintain or modify their own body, on their own terms, through informed, consensual recourse to, or refusal of, available therapeutic or enabling medical technology. Now, this is a big one that, once there, is definitely Pandora’s Box. While theoretically we should have this freedom, I believe possible embodiments, minds, and intelligences are many. Mind design space is tremendously large. And not all configurations will get along. See also my “Intersubjectivity Collapse.” Yet surely we can’t police morphology of generally intelligent sentient beings?

Protected Personal Spacetime

Future civilization will look very different from today’s. There will be countless different sentient and non-sentient beings as well as other intelligent and capable entities roaming around future habitats. And to such a degree that I think our blood-brain barrier, our skin, in general our various layers of membranic protections, as well as the collection of modalities and cognitive capacities, will be woefully inadequate as basic protection of one’s bodily and mental integrity. Even with vastly increased cognitive capacities, I think divergence among future beings will be such that it won’t be feasible to assess who or what you’re dealing with with respect to other agents, neither for unaugmented humans, nor other types of beings. It won’t always be computationally or physically feasible. I’ve written before that we have been piggybacking on the fact that we’re a single dominant species on our planet for very long. When that changes, all future beings should have the right to have a sort of nanotech (if you will) shielding technology that will monitor what goes in and out, and potentially protect and not just alert when something unknown enters. Everyone should get basic self-sustaining protection from outside forces.

This list is not exhaustive.