When a person uses a bullhorn to speak, it is protected because the speech is protected. When a person uses a transmission over rented public airwaves (which may be a newscast, commercial, etc.) that is protected speech. When a group of people band together to propagate their political opinions with action (as in a PAC or Super-PAC), it is protected speech. When a group of people banded together for other purposes (a corporation) find it necessary to also issue statements as a group through that body, it is protected speech. When a person uses his biases to program an algorithm to construct a corpus of opinions (which what Google argues it does) it is protected speech. It is in general an incorrect, artificial distinction to think there are somehow directed forces at work in society that don’t ultimately trace back to the will (and invested rights) of some human persons. And while those forces may act in fashions that would be consider peculiar coming from a singular person, they are none the less the acts of people in the composite.

No one is debating for the right of tools. They are debating the rights of those who craft and use tools. The argument is that if algorithmic output is considered speech, it will be difficult to rein in anti-competitive and privacy-violating “speech.” And it will. Rights are tricky that way. But if the exact same output came from a human compiling it “the hard way,” it would be entitled to protections (and in the case of illegal acts, lack of protection). The output of a computer is not different from the output of a human. It is the same, only moreso. That is the function of a computer: to rapidly, blindly do exactly what some human at some point told it to do. And when that directive is something illegal, it should be just as illegal to do with a computer as without. But not more illegal. And when the thing being done by a human is protected, the same work done by a computer should similarly be protected.

At it’s core, the argument dovetails two classic fallacies of policy: “people can abuse rights and so we should be skeptical about recognizing them too freely” and “technology is scary powerful and so we need to regulate it separately from allother human endeavors”. While the premises are both true, in their fashion, the propositions are nothing but reactionary panic. Technology is mostly irrelevant to the laws touching on fundamental rights: murder with a handgun is basically “just” murder. Speech over radio transmission is just speech. Thought assisted by an algorithm is just thought. And it’s a little sad that we’re going to spend the better part of a century or two on the grind work of re-affirming all of this legally, one right at a time, one shiny new toy at a time.

That out of the way, a program can be protected speech, depending on what it is expressing. Again, this doesn’t have to be that difficult, unless a series of judges create a body of Anglo-Saxon legal precedence that *makes* it difficult.

Finally, the Frankenstein monster would have as many rights and responsibilities as any other brain-damaged individual. It is – according to the written canon – flesh and blood and human DNA through and through. That it got a bit of a jump start to reanimate holds no more legal meaning than if I was defibrillated. The most interesting question is which part of it has rights to its legal estate… and I’m pretty sure a court would go with the provenance of the brain.

Further, there is the question of what a right is; if it is dependent on success within a test, it is neither innate nor inalienable, and therefore not exactly a right, but rather a privilege.

Finally, there is the question of the efficacy of the Turing test itself, as it is ultimately subjective upon the tester; my stringency in requirements for accepting patterns of input and output as representing sentience may be more or less demanding than yours, so how does this really say anything categorical about sentience?

In regards to speech and algorithms, I have to wonder if the argument from Google’s side (as restated in various articles) isn’t putting the cart before the horse.  I can see Google’s output being speech, not because programmers are putting creativity into the algorithm, but because Google wants to claim it as its speech.  Just being the output of an autonomous thing they created shouldn’t make it speech.

Of course, that depends on Google going all the way with claiming it as their speech.  To do that, they should be fully responsible for anything that comes out, and they can’t just shrug and say “oh, that wacky algorithm!”  They should be just as responsible for the algorithm’s results as they would be for statements coming from their employees.  I somehow don’t get the sense that this is what’s desired, however.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. 

Comeon, man. information wants to be free.

If I’m one of a million people who are responsible for, say, a hate speech site being given high preference by a search algorithm with relation to a particular benign term, and the only evidence linking me to this action is pseudo-anonymous IP address, how can I practically be brought to bear responsibility (along with the other 999,999 people) for the results of my actions? It is naturally much easier to blame the service provider for allowing such an action to happen in the first place.

If we don’t want our service providers to bear the responsibility for the actions of its users, then it seems to require a dissolution of the veil of anonymity that we’ve become accustomed to on this wild wild web. Not that I’m necessarily advocating for this, but rather I think the trade-offs between anonymity and proper culpability need to be seriously considered.