South Africa, March 25 -- Opinion | Damon Stapleton's take on what is it to be human?

A week before the Coronavirus infected the world I was trying to answer this question in a discussion with my 16 year old son Jake. It was a discussion all about the great film Blade Runner . It covered replicants, robots and AI. The question asked was could machines ever get human rights? Could something created in a lab one day in the future be so similar to us they deserve human rights? If a machine could think and feel just like a human, would that make them human? If you take Descartes philosophical proposition, I think, therefore I am, this leads you to all sorts of difficult possibilities if machines were able to think like us. And, if your insti...