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Could I Be Charged With Murder?

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Posted by Mark on October 18, 2001 01:50:40 UTC

If I were to kill an Artificial Intelligence robot against its will?

What if it were possible to store a consciousness to a disk, but it wasn't possible to transfer a mind back into a physical body. Now if we lived in a society advanced to the point that I could "upload" my friend into some advanced internet, and then proceed to destroy his physical body... does this quailfy as "murder"? What happens if before the uploading takes place, I were to burn the computer disk? Did I now commit a cold blooded act? At what ponit is it considered "ending a life"?

Let's come back down to more current times. Say that in our time, somebody were to put somebody else in a coma for the rest of the "physical body's" natural life... Then at what point is that person considered dead? What if you go brain dead on life support, but your physical body still functions and cells still divide so long as the machines keep running. Consciouness is gone, but your body lives on. Is it fair to define death as the decay of the physical body? I don't think so in this case... Like it or not, that person has passed away regardless of whether the body can still digest food and grow new skin cells (Maybe not in the "brain dead" case but in the case of a permanenet coma).

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