Gifting robot rights relies on Eurocentric conception of humanity- we should instead prepare ourselves to accept robot demands for rights

(Daniel Estrada, Ethics@Newark, Human supremacy as posthuman risk. Journal of Sociotechnical Critique, 1(1), 1–40.

https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1013&context=sociotechnicalcritique)

It is worth considering why human-centered politics is so broadly welcomed in AI ethics, despite the otherwise dismal status of the “human” in the political climate of the Anthropocene (Ellis, 2015; D. J. Haraway, 2016; Lewis & Maslin, 2015). The literature discusses two justifications which have, on their surface, relatively little to do with each other: the wellestablished international policy framework of human rights (Latonero, 2018; Risse, 2018), and the presumed metaphysical non-agency of artifacts like machines and pieces of software (Boden et al., 2017; Fossa, 2018). These justifications will be addressed in later sections through the lens of Braidotti’s critical posthumanism and Mills’s critique of ideal theory. However, one version of the second justification should be addressed before moving from the animal ethics literature. It is commonly argued that AI is neither biological nor alive, so cannot suffer like animals and other living creatures, and therefore cannot participate in a moral community in the relevant way to deserve moral consideration or critical advocacy. If animal advocacy is primarily motivated by animal suffering, and if robots cannot suffer, this would undermine the possibility that robots could stand in need of the sort of political activism seen in the animal advocacy movement. Such arguments can be resisted on several grounds. Environmentalists since at least Aldo Leopold’s Land ethic (1949) have emphasized the value of nonliving systems like the soil, water, and air that do not “suffer” in the experiential sense of animals with a nervous system, but which nevertheless are vital for the integrity of ecological communities, and so warrant a focal role in our norms and practices (Konopka, 2013). Kate Darling notes that while the philosophical and ethical discussion of animal rights revolves around issues like pain and consciousness, “our laws indicate that these concerns are secondary when it comes to legal protections” (Darling, 2016, p. 17). Instead, Darling argues that laws tend to follow public attitudes towards animals that do not depend on biological differences, as with laws in the U.S. that protect horses but not cows from being killed and eaten, despite few biological differences that could justify this practice. Several scholars have noted how the emphasis on conscious experiences in AI privilege a Western European and predominantly Christian perspective on artifacts and their relationship to nature, ethics and society—a perspective that is not universally shared (Williams, 2019b; Gunkel, 2018a; Jones, 2015). Assuming this perspective marginalizes non-Western traditions that do not operate on an anthropocentric hierarchy of value, such as found in Shinto (Geraci, 2006), African and African diasporic (Jackson, 2020; Metz, 2017; Horsthemke, 2017), and First Nations (Pierotti & Wildcat, 2000) philosophy. Finally, there are the ongoing discriminatory practices in which biological factors are treated as scientific justification for institutional oppression based on race, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability, or other essentializing characteristics (Jackson, 2020; Appiah, 2018). Taken together, these considerations suggest that biological factors alone should not be treated as prima facie justification for the exclusion of artificial agents from the moral community. Nevertheless, the literature on “robot rights” is overwhelmingly preoccupied with whether robots have internal states sufficiently “like ours” to warrant social status and legal recognition (Wittkower, forthcoming; Danaher, 2019; Williams, 2019a, 2018; Gunkel, 2018b; Schwitzgebel & Garza, 2015). 8 The hypercritical focus on the machine’s experiences (or lack thereof) points to another important distinction between animals and AI: artificial agents already participate in a variety of sociopolitical contexts that were formerly the exclusive domain of humans. There already exist vibrant online communities building, publishing, and critically assessing the work of bots that write poetry and fiction, create digital images and videos, compose music, and produce other forms of ‘artistic’ expression (Hertzmann, 2019; Oliveira, 2017; Compton et al., 2017; Gilani et al., 2017). Perhaps most well-known are the artificial “influencers” like Lil Miquela who model fashion brands to millions of followers on social media (Blanton & Carbajal, 2019). These digital communities highlight the already overlapping sociopolitical circumstances of human and artificial agents, which are not predicated on some shared biological or evolutionary background, nor on shared experiences or conscious states, but more concretely on the material and institutional realities within which human and nonhuman agents “share existence” (Latour, 2003). Just as the shared material realities of oppression provide a framework for collaboration among resistance movements addressing both human and nonhuman animal interests—despite important differences in the history and experiences motivating this work—this very same framework for collaboration provides resources to resist biocentrism, anthropocentrism, and other essentializing hierarchies as they appear in the discourse around robots, AI, and artificial agency, despite important differences between human and artificial agents. Moreover, unlike nonhuman animals, it is reasonable to expect the capacities of artificial agents will continue to advance rapidly on relatively short timescales, at least within some domains. The possibility for radical near-term changes in the agential capacities of robots suggests their sociopolitical status will likewise remain unsettled. Peter Asaro notes, “At some point in the future, robots might simply demand their rights” (Asaro, 2006, p. 12). However, while articulating these demands may require fundamental changes in the capacities of artificial agents, it will also require an ethical and interpretive change in our capacities as a society to respect such demands as potentially legitimate political acts. These changes in the social imagination don’t require that we wait for technologies “worthy” of basic consideration. Alan Turing articulated this perspective in his plea for “fair play for machines” (Turing, 1947; Estrada, 2018a) just as the first general purpose computers inspired by his work were being constructed in research labs. If the kind of critical selfreflection required to advocate on behalf of machines was available to Turing, surely it is available to us as well.