The "1986 classic" is The Anthropic Cosmological Principle.

R. Gancie/C.Parcelli wrote:
>
> Because of the broad commercial applications in industry, the U.S.
> Congress
> and the courts will in the near future be taking up the question of
> whether or not to grant
> "human rights" to automata, or robots. Of course, automata have been
> around for millenia, flourishing especially in Europe during the
> Renaissance and Enlightenment.
>
> The advent of modern automata, that is ones with commercial viability as
> well as anthropomorphic associations, can be in large part attributed to
> the work of the mathematician John von Neumann. In his book, Theory of
> Self-Reproducing Automata published in 1966 (preceded by numerous papers
> beginning two decades earlier) Von Neumann realizes in a viable
> scientific form, robots which not only reproduce themselves, but also
> are programmed, evolutionarily, to colonize space, literally gobbling
> there way across the universe. Of course, they will have long replaced
> mankind by then and as Moravec, Barrow, Tipler, Casti, Gelertner et al
> insist are the "natural" evolutionary heirs of our species.
>
> Von Neumann in his book formulates the physical structure of his
> self-reproducing automata. They are to have eight kinds of parts: A
> "stimulus organ", a "coincidence organ", an "inhibitory organ", a
> "stimuli producer", a "fusing organ", a "cutting organ" ["Ouch!"], a
> "muscle", and a "rigid member". Thus, these automata reproduce. During
> this exegesis describing the logical evolutionary heirs of mankind
> occurs this apparently unintended humorous aside: "A rigid member
> doesn't carry any stimuli." In other words "the rigid member" plays no
> role in the reproductive process.
>
> Thus, our physicists have become legal ethicists. To this end, John
> Barrow and Frank Tipler wrote in their 1986 "classic" published by
> Oxford Univ. Press: "As we have shown at length in Chapters 3 and 8, an
> advanced von Neumann probe would be an intelligent being in its own
> right, only made of metal rather than flesh and blood. The rise in human
> civilization has been marked by a decline in racism[?]--which include
> freedom--to a wider and wider class of people: in fact, the arguments
> one hears today against considering intelligent computers to be persons
> and against giving them human rights have precise parallels in the
> nienteenth-century argumant against giving blacks and women full human
> rights." Thus, this historically suspect and highly reactionary
> statement couches itself in the progressive rhetoric of science.