A much misunderstood cosmic principle got downlinked to Earth recently. A futures research group commissioned by the British Government has concluded that in the course of the next 50 years robots will have developed sufficiently to merit recognition as entities on whom human rights would ultimately have to be conferred. The report also implies that since these machines would by then be imbued with artificial intelligence, extensive interpersonal communication skills and the capacity to make ethical choices, they ought to be accepted as a separate species of living creatures. As argued wrongly here earlier by this writer, that would not automatically make us their creators though to whom they would somehow owe allegiance.

The reason is simple: you only confer human rights on something when you appreciate that something possesses at least a significant measure of your own humanity. Thus, by exhibiting those particular traits which we regard as quintessentially human, robots will pass muster. This was bound to happen because when you make something in the likeness of your image, you have to necessarily be an element of it and leave a part of your image indelibly embedded in it for all time. In other words, one doesn’t create, one extends out.

It’s like what the Buddhists say: the Buddha nature is residing in all of us. Or as other similar doctrines maintain, God not only is in us, he has to be there because he extended us out of himself and is therefore deeply entangled in that function forever. At best, the temporary distinction is merely one of appearance. That is, one is of a non-corporeal nature while the other is physically ‘base’ in existence. Yet both are forms of the same style of being. In the case of our situation vis-à-vis robots, one is of organic flesh and blood, while the other is fashioned of ‘base’ synthetic matter. Yet both are matters of the same elements found in nature.

May be in times to come most of these machines might forget their human nature and exist in oblivious worlds like most of us do who have forgotten our Buddha nature. And who knows, may be from among them will, from time to time, arise more enlightened Buddhas (or humans, if you will) in future to point out the essential oneness of all things. Then one day they too will extend out into other forms of themselves which will appear different to them superficially but of course would be the same underneath. It’s a much misunderstood comic principle of how life goes on.