Assumptions behind robot rights obscure AI ethics- they focus on future AI and ignore existing impact

(Abeba, CompSci@Dublin, Jelle, Management@Twente, Robot Rights? Let’s Talk about Human Welfare Instead https://arxiv.org/pdf/2001.05046.pdf)

Some may argue that the idea of robot rights is a peculiar, irrelevant discussion existing only at the fringes of AI ethics research more broadly construed, and as such devoting our time to it would not be paying justice to the important work done in that field. But the idea of robot rights is, in principle, perfectly legitimate if one stays true to the materialistic commitments of artificial intelligence: in principle it should be possible to build an artificially intelligent machine, and if we would succeed in doing so, there would be no reason not to grant this machine the rights we attribute to ourselves. Our critique therefore is not that the reasoning is invalid as such, but rather that we should question its underlying assumptions. Robot rights signal something more serious about AI technology, namely, that, grounded in their materialist techno-optimism, scientists and technologists are so preoccupied with the possible future of an imaginary machine, that they forget the very real, negative impact their intermediary creatures - the actual AI systems we have today - have on actual human beings. In other words: the discussion of robot rights is not to be separated from AI ethics, and AI ethics should concern itself with scrutinizing and reflecting deeply on underlying assumptions of scientists and engineers, rather than seeing its project as ’just’ a practical matter of discussing the ethical constraints and rules that should govern AI technologies in society.