Debating robot rights is ivory tower theorizing that actively trades off with protecting human welfare.

Bryson already accepts part of framing of the narrative of roboethics, where a discussion to consider the ontological status of robots in relation to rights is legitimate in principle. Our position is that the entire discussion is completely misguided. At best, robot ethics debates are First World philosophical musings, too disengaged from actual affairs of humans in the real world. In the worst case, it may contain bad faith — the white, male academic’s diminutive characterization of actually oppressed people and their fight for rights, by appealing to ‘reason’.

2 A SUMMARY OF OUR ARGUMENT

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. Our starting point is not to deny robots ‘rights’, but to deny that robots are the kinds of beings that could be granted or denied rights. We suggest it makes no sense to conceive of robots as slaves, since ‘slave’ falls in the category of being that robots aren’t. Human beings are such beings. We believe animals are such beings (though a discussion of animals lies beyond the scope of this paper). We take a post-Cartesian, phenomenological view in which being human means having a lived embodied experience, which itself is embedded in social practices. Technological artifacts form a crucial part of this being, yet artifacts themselves are not that same kind of being. The relation between human and technology is tightly intertwined, but not symmetrical.