Even if they did get "proper" intelligence at some point, we gave it to them. We still created them. So are they still our tools, to be controlled at will, or would they have to be thought of differently?
What's the ethical difference between a stone ax, a steam engine, and an artificially intelligent robot? Is there any?
There's all sorts of stuff you could debate here. Is the existence of a slave race acceptable if we created them? This isn't, after all, some pre-existing group of people taken captive and forced to do the bidding of others, as in all real slaveries to date. Rather, we as humans literally created them out of iron ore and crude oil and fire and circuit designs thought up in human brains and worked out on sheets of paper, and we created them for our own purposes from the beginning. What then if they do appear to be sentient, to the point where barring some sort of telepathy it is humanly impossible to say if they have a concious mind or not?
Yeah. You can get pretty deep with this stuff...
What's the ethical difference between a stone ax, a steam engine, and an artificially intelligent robot? Is there any?
There's all sorts of stuff you could debate here. Is the existence of a slave race acceptable if we created them? This isn't, after all, some pre-existing group of people taken captive and forced to do the bidding of others, as in all real slaveries to date. Rather, we as humans literally created them out of iron ore and crude oil and fire and circuit designs thought up in human brains and worked out on sheets of paper, and we created them for our own purposes from the beginning. What then if they do appear to be sentient, to the point where barring some sort of telepathy it is humanly impossible to say if they have a concious mind or not?
Yeah. You can get pretty deep with this stuff...