Power to the Robots: Power to the Robots, Right On!

We have yet to ensure equal rights for humans, some demand "rights" for animals, and now we have a group dedicated to ensuring equal rights for robots--when they exist, that is. What rights would those be? After all, robots would not be alive:

Existence, Independence, and the Pursuit of Greater Cognition... Should robots reach the level of self-awareness and show genuine intelligence, we must be prepared to treat them as sentient beings, and respect their desires, wants, and needs as we respect those things in our human society. Failure to recognize and grant these rights to non-human artificial intelligences would be a crime on the order of the 19th Century's failure to recognize the humanity and attendant rights of people of African descent. Outward differences in appearances should in no way affect our ethical treatment of self-aware, intelligent beings.

How about we just don't create machines that would appear to have such traits?

This may be a put-on, but I doubt it. Some people are obsessed about granting human moral status to a wide assortment of non human entities. With this as a growing mindset, why not include inanimate objects?

Ethical Guidelines to Protect Robots From Abuse

This is so ridiculous. Ethical guidelines are being drafted to protect humans from robot abuse and robots from human abuse. First, robots are inanimate objects. I don't care how sophisticated or "intelligent" they become, they could no more be abused than my vacuum cleaner or the Dell computer on which I am writing this post. Sophisticated processing of information is not the same thing as becoming a "being." Even the most sophisticated robots will always be inanimate.

The story also contains this point: Other bodies are also thinking about the robotic future. Last year a UK government study predicted that in the next 50 years robots could demand the same rights as human beings. If robots could really become so elevated that they would "demand rights," there is a simple solution: Don't construct them! We have choices in this regard. Because we can do something--highly doubtful in this matter--that doesn't mean we should to it.

Why don't these people tackle real problems?