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.