Robot Rights?

Abstract

The 'robot rights' debate, and its related question of 'robot responsibility', invokes some of the most polarized positions in AI ethics. While some advocate for granting robots rights on a par with human beings, others, in a stark opposition argue that robots are not deserving of rights but are objects that should be our slaves. Grounded in post-Cartesian philosophical foundations, we argue not just to deny robots 'rights', but to deny that robots, as artifacts emerging out of and mediating human being, are the kinds of things that could be granted rights in the first place. Once we see robots as mediators of human being, we can understand how the 'robot rights' debate is focused on first world problems, at the expense of urgent ethical concerns, such as machine bias, machine elicited human labour exploitation, and erosion of privacy all impacting society's least privileged individuals. We conclude that, if human being is our starting point and human welfare is the primary concern, the negative impacts emerging from machinic systems, as well as the lack of taking responsibility by people designing, selling and deploying such machines, remains the most pressing ethical discussion in AI.

Reflections on Binary Sex/Gender Categorization in Magnetic Resonance Tomography and its Future Challenges

“…And on the other hand, we need to appreciate how these concepts of difference (sex, gender, class, and "race") are intersectionally intertwined with each other. For interdisciplinary or rather intersectional approaches, we need to ask to what extent the categories of "race" or class have found their way into the statistical measurement strategies of contemporary brain research (Abiodun 2019;Birhane and Guest 2020;Rollins 2021).…”

The Impossibility of Automating Ambiguity

“…How do we prepare humanity for the Singularity? These concerns, for the most part, focus on hypothetical and/or future "First World Problems" (Birhane & van Dijk, 2020). These quests might be a valid intellectual exercise in and of themselves but in light of the mass integration of ML systems into society and the harms they impose on vulnerable individuals and communities, I argue that attention regarding machine ethics should primarily focus on current and tangible concerns.…”

Robotic Knitting

“…Disentangling the tie between dehumanisation and labour further, I briefly look into strands that (1) connect the emergence of robots as workers with the question of human welfare (Birhane & Dijk 2020), and (2) develop an account of the surrogate human effect as "the racial 'grammar' of technoliberalism" (Atanasoski & Vora 2019, 5). Reading these strands as strings that become partners in my game of cat's cradle with the figure of the robotic worker, I regard my feelings of unsettlement with hegemonic debates on a replacement of human workers through the enslavement of robots as guiding this selection of strings.…”

“…For a discussion on care in the context of the hospital and future robotic co-workers, see for instance: von Bose& Treusch 2013; …”