Birhane paper calls robot rights a legal 'smoke screen'

A preprint from Abeba Birhane, Jelle van Dijk and Frank Pasquale argues that machines are not the kind of thing that can hold rights at all, and that robot-rights discourse functions as a 'smoke screen' for the firms deploying current AI. The paper, forthcoming in a First Monday special issue on 'Ideologies of AI and the consolidation of power,' builds a three-part case: metaphysical, ethical, and legal.

Metaphysically, the authors ground their position in phenomenology and post-Cartesian cognitive science, writing that 'machines are not the kinds of things that may be denied or granted rights.' Ethically, given 'machines current and potential harms to the most marginalized in society,' the paper argues that 'limits on (rather than rights for) machines should be at the centre of current AI ethics debate.'

The legal argument is the pointed one. 'From a legal perspective, the best analogy to robot rights is not human rights but corporate rights,' the authors write, a doctrine whose 'most important effect has been the undermining of worker, consumer, and voter rights by advancing the power of capital to exercise outsized influence on politics and law.'

The conclusion is blunt. Robot-rights fantasy, once absorbed into legal theory, 'threaten to immunize from legal accountability the current AI and robotics that is fuelling surveillance capitalism, accelerating environmental destruction, and entrenching injustice and human suffering,' the paper says. Two of the AI researchers in our Who's Who feed have circulated the link.