Robot overlords are nigh

I've been joking over the past few years that -- after gay rights -- the next major civil rights dustup will be that of intelligent machines to self-determination and legal equality. In doing so, I'm only half jesting.

There's also a theological problem here, for people who believe the story of the Tower of Babel:

Now the whole world had one language and a common speech.  As men moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there.  They said to each other, "Come, let's make bricks and bake them thoroughly." They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar.  Then they said, "Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the whole earth."

But the LORD came down to see the city and the tower that the men were building.  The LORD said, "If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them.  Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other."

So the LORD scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city.  That is why it was called Babel—because there the LORD confused the language of the whole world. From there the LORD scattered them over the face of the whole earth.

If erecting a tall building into the heavens was cause enough for Yahweh to scatter humans across the Earth, what's he going to go when we finally create something more intelligent than ourselves?  Scatter us across solar systems?