The Rise of Smart Machines Puts Spotlight on ‘Robot Rights’

You probably wouldn’t have any qualms about switching off Apple’s virtual assistant, Siri — or Amazon’s Alexa or Microsoft’s Cortana. Such entities emulate a human assistant but plainly aren’t human. We sense that beneath the sophisticated software, there’s “nobody home.”
But artificial intelligence is progressing swiftly. In the not-too-distant future we may begin to feel that our machines have something akin to thoughts and feelin