[satisfice]

There is no point at which artificial life assumes the mantle and status of human life, because if there was such a thing it would immediately lead to the destruction of our society. Imagine if I could press a button and generate 50,000 instances of something that has the same rights as me. This is the equivalent of getting three wishes and making one of them be “50,000 more wishes.” If it were allowed the whole system implodes.

Either my 50,000 are slaves who outvote you and change all the laws because you didn’t act fast enough to make your own slave army, or each of my 50,000 uses their rights to generate 50,000 more of theor own slaves, ad infinitum.

This experiment is a reductio ad absurdum to the notion that artificial life— essentially a long string of carefully chosen bits— can have rights.

But aren’t real humans just information too, you ask? Yes. The reason we insist on human rights is simply that the alternative is endless war.