I don't think it's a choice between "race to the bottom" or "race to the top". Someone needs to do dangerous, nasty, repetitive jobs if we want to maintain a standard of living that many people have become used to. Creatures with the sort of agency you're describing are, in my opinion, unsuited to those tasks, for several reasons, including moral and economic reasons. The robots we are increasingly using to do those jobs are much better suited, and there isn't (again, in my opinion) a moral objection that solely applies to such machines.
That said, our policies are woefully out of date in the face of such increasing automation. Our current system inflates employment and even a meager standard of living. We are going to need to revise our polices, both in the more developed nations and in those that have, as you so tastefully put it, "different labor standards". I don't know how to do this. There are many proposals; a popular one is the basic income guarantee. I'm not educated or intelligent enough to really understand the implications of such a policy, but I can agree that the just and humane treatment of all creatures with the agency you're talking about is among the best guiding principles that I can think of.
The two issues raised above (whether it is moral to use a machine for automation, and the fair treatment of creatures with agency) is separate from the point related to the development of human-manufactured creatures with agency. We don't know how to do it yet, but we are slowly working towards it. Assuming that we eventually do figure it out, that will be a victory as long as we treat our new children like we would treat our homo sapiens children. The research and development of such creatures with agency and those for industrial automation are not mutually exclusive, and serve different purposes.
To try to put it a different way: something is going to need to harvest fruit. It's a shit job. I would rather have Spot do it than a person of any variety, human or otherwise.
Should we allow some of our creations to have access to their design docs and source code? How about private communication with each other?
There's also a property/control rights question: should the manufacturer and/or regulator of the autonomous device always have a remote override, or should the purchaser/owner of the device have exclusive control over software policy? Analogies can be made with DRM and autos.
I don't think it's a choice between "race to the bottom" or "race to the top". Someone needs to do dangerous, nasty, repetitive jobs if we want to maintain a standard of living that many people have become used to. Creatures with the sort of agency you're describing are, in my opinion, unsuited to those tasks, for several reasons, including moral and economic reasons. The robots we are increasingly using to do those jobs are much better suited, and there isn't (again, in my opinion) a moral objection that solely applies to such machines.
That said, our policies are woefully out of date in the face of such increasing automation. Our current system inflates employment and even a meager standard of living. We are going to need to revise our polices, both in the more developed nations and in those that have, as you so tastefully put it, "different labor standards". I don't know how to do this. There are many proposals; a popular one is the basic income guarantee. I'm not educated or intelligent enough to really understand the implications of such a policy, but I can agree that the just and humane treatment of all creatures with the agency you're talking about is among the best guiding principles that I can think of.
The two issues raised above (whether it is moral to use a machine for automation, and the fair treatment of creatures with agency) is separate from the point related to the development of human-manufactured creatures with agency. We don't know how to do it yet, but we are slowly working towards it. Assuming that we eventually do figure it out, that will be a victory as long as we treat our new children like we would treat our homo sapiens children. The research and development of such creatures with agency and those for industrial automation are not mutually exclusive, and serve different purposes.
To try to put it a different way: something is going to need to harvest fruit. It's a shit job. I would rather have Spot do it than a person of any variety, human or otherwise.