[vidarh]

That may be so, but imagine when they get cheap enough that e.g. NSA installations must be kept at ridiculous cleanroom conditions because every speck of dust may be conducting counter-surveillance, or automatically dump footage onto Youtube.

[pbhjpbhj]

Perhaps at some point we'll be able to harness weakly interacting particles, like neutrinos, to such an extent that we can just fire a beam through a building and image the entire contents including magnetic domains or memristor structures or crystal lattices or whatever we're using for data storage then.

[RobertoG]

Actually, you can see that scene in another brilliant SF novel: David Marusek's "Counting Heads" (even better that "A Deepness in the Sky" in my opinion)

[ceequof]

Ehhh. Marusek makes several rather large conceptual leaps in order to make his plot hang together: notably, both human clones and intelligent machines have no civil rights, at all, to the point that either can be killed at the will of their owners.

Most ludicrously, there's no hint of political opposition or a protest movement. At no point does any character say anything like "Hey, wait, maybe clones are humans too?" or "Maybe sentient machines should have rights?"

[lione]

If there's anything Sci-Fi has taught me, it's that sentient machines will either be our salvation or our doom, and in both of those cases, treating them like they have no rights isn't good for our health in the long run, so to do so is stupid.

As for clones, considering how often our bodies replace all our cells, you aren't remotely close to the same person you were even a year ago, which proves that it's our minds and experiences/memories that make us who we are. With that in mind, and knowing many other people would agree, the idea that everyone would be ok with a clone slave force is absurd. Maybe if they were brainless chunks of lobotomized flesh incapable of learning and totally empty of sentient though, but otherwise?

[ethbro]

I'm reading through Ian Bank's Culture series currently, and enjoy the way he treats it.

In a post-scarcity culture, where energy and information are more or less the only resources, what argument is there against agreeing to give sufficiently advanced AIs rights?

[ansible]

If you haven't read Charles Stross' Accelerando [1] yet, there's a character early on that advocates for AI rights so that maybe they will fairly treat the humans who made them later on.

[1] http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelera...

[Lorento]

It doesn't have to be for "our" benefit (who's that? not us personally, we won't be there). It could be for their own benefit - same reason slaves were freed.