The European Legal Affairs Committee suggests the need to include a kill switch (opt-out mechanisms) for AIPs. I will shorten this to ‘OOM’. The OOM euphemism provides a guilt release. Humanity can delude itself in the belief it has control over any situation as Kurt Vonnegut wrote “The only controls available to those on board were two push-buttons on the center post of the cabin — one labeled on and one labeled off. The on button simply started a flight from Mars. The off button connected to nothing. It was installed at the insistence of the Martian mental-health experts, who said that human beings were always happier with machinery they thought they could turn off.” If you have difficulty in OOMing your faithful Roomba, think how hard it might be if it asked you to reconsider. Consider if instead of immortality, AIPs live a limited number of years. Science fiction covers both ends of the spectrum of planned obsolescence of the most brutal kind to the inability to self-terminate. If we incorporated a pre-determined life span, would we tell our AIPs the exact date? We could leave the date determination to a random number generator entitled Final Actual Time Expiry, or FATE.
