You substantially overrate the legal system's concern with simple sentient rights and basic dignity. The legal system will have no problem determining what to do with such a machine. It will be the property of whoever happens to own it under the same rules as any other computer hardware and software.
Now mind you, I'm not saying that's the right answer (for more than one definition of right) but it is the answer the legal system will give.
It'll be the default, certainly. But I suspect there's going to be enough room for lawyers to play that it'll stay wrapped up in red tape for many years. (Interestingly, I think that might actually make it more dangerous in some ways - if we really do leapfrog humans on intelligence, giving it years while we wait on lawyers might be a dangerous thing to do. OTOH, there's generally no truckloads of silicon chips going into the middle of a legal dispute like that, so it might slow things down too.)
The Register talks to Google's Alfred Spector:
Google's approach toward artificial intelligence embodies a new way of designing and running complex systems. Rather than create a monolithic entity with its own modules for reasoning about certain inputs and developing hypotheses that let it bootstrap its own intelligence into higher and higher abstractions away from base inputs, as other AI researchers did through much of the 60s and 70s, Google has instead taken a modular approach.
"We have the knowledge graph, [the] ability to parse natural language, neural network tech [and] enormous opportunities to gain feedback from users," Spector said in an earlier speech at Google IO. "If we combine all these things together with humans in the loop continually providing feedback our systems become ... intelligent."
Spector calls this his "combination hypothesis", and though Google is not there yet – SkyNet does not exist – you can see the first green buds of systems that have the appearance of independent intelligence via some of the company's user-predictive technologies such as Google Now, the new Maps and, of course, the way it filters search results according to individual identity.
(Emphasis mine.) I don't have a transcript, but there are videos online. Spector is clearly smart, and apparently he expects an AI to appear in a completely different way than Eliezer does. And he has all the resources and financing he wants, probably 3-4 orders of magnitude over MIRI's. His approach, if workable, also appears safe: it requires human feedback in the loop. What do you guys think?