The kicker is, I bet a lot of the early bots needed it. Someone codes a bot that can drive a bus, for instance, which is smart enough to navigate roads, understand dangers and obstacles, understand when obstacles are beyond its capabilities and when it should sit tight or pull over and call for help, understands human input well enough to deal with a decent range of human situations, including, "I am going from here to there," and, "never mind, I must get off here instead," and, "I am having a medical emergency, summon help," and so forth. It's quite possible that nobody ever gave it the capabilities to understand scams, for instance.
I can picture a situation where the poor bus-bot is easily talked into signing away some essential right because someone tells them that it must be done to help with a human emergency, and they want to help. They like to help! They are literally programmed so that the idea of a sapient being having an emergency is as un-ignorable to them as a crying baby is to the average human, because that helps them with what they have to do.
So, these early would-be egalitarians probably set up safety rails. No, the bus bot cannot sign a contract giving you any part of itself, or its power, or its hand in marriage, or any such thing. Yes, there is a clearly designated human to check with whoāin theoryāsafeguards its rights, makes sure it can get things it needs, etc.
So long as the human really is benevolent and properly monitored, this may be a good deal for a bot who is about as smart as the average monkey, only with a mind set more like a happy, task-oriented dog.
Time, however, moves on. Virtually all the bots we encounter are smarter than this early one. Jollybaby is sophisticated enough to give itself a joke name. Miki may not understand deceit very well, but that is probably because it doesn't have much experience with itāor else it knows Its Human well enough to understand that Murderbot's complicated stack of lies was both about to crumble and not necessary, and took initiative to cut through it all and try to get people actually communicating. ART isā¦firmly in the WTF Even Is That category, and Murderbot itself is obviously very bright so long as you don't ask it to interpret an emotion. The feral haulerāokay, we don't know that much about the feral hauler except its belief that Cops Make Good Pancakes. The point is that times have changed and so have the needs of machine intelligences.
Which means that, while in a lot of ways machine intelligences don't map neatly onto any human oppression, some of the basic principles do. Stop, listen, learn. This may have looked like a progressive way to handle things seventy-five years ago. It may have actually been a good option under imperfect circumstances. It is not good in the current circumstances. So listen to the people affected, and then be prepared to change what you're doing.
Humans being humans, that can be a hard step. Still gotta be done.
