Doctorow: 'rights for robots' affirms the AI-as-slave sales pitch

Cory Doctorow's July 10 Pluralistic post reframes the AI sales pitch in blunt terms. What bosses are actually being sold, he argues, is a worker who neither deserves nor demands moral consideration. In his words, 'the biggest difference between a machine and a person is moral consideration,' and there is only one kind of person you get to treat that way, a slave.

The frame he wants to disturb is the growing 'rights for robots' conversation. His move is to point out that once you argue robots deserve rights, you have implicitly accepted that they are a class of workers currently denied them. That, he writes, 'affirms' the sales pitch rather than defusing it. The debate itself becomes marketing, legitimising a labour category defined by having no standing.

Under the marketing, there is real labour. Doctorow notes that much of what gets sold as automation still runs on a 'human in the loop,' and that loop is often outsourced to overseas call centres. He calls these workers 'Absent Indians': low-waged call-center workers pretending to be robots. The reader is supposed to see the trick. The algorithm's authority comes from hiding the human behind it, not from replacing them.

He pairs the labour argument with a legal one, drawn from a century of corporate personhood. Extending legal status to an artificial construct, he writes, has been a 'catastrophe for human thriving,' because the artificial entity ends up wielding rights against natural people. Extending rights to nature, he argues, has done the opposite. So the analogy that should worry us most about AI personhood is not the friendly one about pets or rivers. It is the corporation.

The honest caveat is that this is an opinion column on Pluralistic, not a piece of reporting. Doctorow does not name specific AI vendors running specific overseas operations, and does not survey the 'rights for robots' campaigners he is arguing against. What the piece does give you is a frame for reading the next round of AI-and-labour stories. Watch who benefits from the personhood analogy, and watch who is still doing the work behind the chatbot.