2020/01/14 by Abeba Birhane, Jelle van Dijk · 6 voices · 117 citations
Computer Science · Social Sciences · #Artificial intelligence #Computer science #Digital Economy and Work Transformation #Digitalization, Law, and Regulation #Ethics and Social Impacts of AI #Robot #cs.CY
paper · pdf · open access · doi:10.1145/3375627.3375855
published in Proceedings of the AAAI/ACM Conference on AI Ethics and Society, 207-213 · Accepted to the AIES 2020 conference in New York, February 2020. The final version of this paper will appear in Proceedings of the 2020 AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society
arxiv created 2020/01/14 · arxiv updated 2020/01/16 · openalex publication_date 2020/02/05 · openalex created_date 2022/07/28 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
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 `robots 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.