On robot ‘rights’

I’ve been encountering more, and more serious and sophisticated, arguments for the robot ‘rights’ recently and I have thoughts.

I am always open to the possibility that I may be missing or misunderstanding something but, it seems to me, that one way academic robot rights advocates think they will succeed is by attacking conventional western ontology. They tend to do this by arguing that a robot is something that blurs the supposed binary of ‘person’ and ‘thing’ and instead start by calling everything a ‘being.’

As a long-time environmental activist, I can’t help but feel partly responsible for this. This is because one of the main foundations for this argument is deep ecology / ecocentric thought, and what Arne Naess called the expansion of “the sphere of moral considerability,” in other words the extension of what we had previously considered to be the exclusive qualities of (white, male, able-bodied etc.) humans to more humans, animals and even ecosystems and things in the environment (mountains, rivers etc.). If a whale or a mountain can have rights, the argument goes, why not a robot? Aren’t they all ‘beings?’

But this is both disingenuous and a straw man, as well simply black-boxing, and thereby denying, the work that has already been done in creating the understanding of the concept of ‘being.’ What I mean by this is that in the discussion of rights, ‘being’ already means something and exists within a network of relations that produces power. For example it folds the notion of ‘living’ into ‘being’ so that the adjective is invisible. If we erase the concept of life here, sure, maybe ‘being’ no longer seems to require that quality. But ‘being’ can’t simply be applied to something else without a justification for that application that takes account of all of that work, the previous translations and movement, the qualities and qualifications and is able to perform a similar labour to some standard of satisfaction that we can recognise as successful.

Instead, rather than being in any way a fundamental reframing, just redefining everything as a ‘being’ reduces this application to a mere rhetorical move, one which just tries to associate all that existing work, and particularly the now invisible and black-boxed, ‘life’, with anything one choses. At the same, the the very existence of the rhetorical move itself is denied in the name of something like ‘deconstruction’ (well, anything will do, really…). It’s a classic power play.

In a materialist analysis, like all tools, robots are not living. They are devices created for extending and supplementing human power. Human power animates them and flows through them, not life. They produce nothing in themselves. It does not matter if a robot is given a cute name, or something that looks like a face, or is programmed to move as if it is dancing, or to use heuristic algorithms that alter its movement or function. It is not alive. It may be a ‘being’ if we accept that being can be redefined to mean anything, but it is not a living being.

Like calling it any tool a ‘being’, using this argument as a foundation for robot rights is an obfuscatatory gesture that is an attempted exercise of power whilst hiding power relations. This argument would have us believe that ultimately destroying a security robot is not fundamentally different from killing a cat or a human being. But cats and human beings are not security devices, they are alive. They are not devices whose only function is security. A security robot is just a security camera that can move and act in some way. it doesn’t acquire a different moral or legal quality because movement might once have been felt to be an exclusive quality of living beings. And destroying a security robot is fundamentally no different than destroying a surveillance camera. The only way the ‘being’ argument would work here is the absurd trajectory that the surveillance camera too has ‘rights,’ or maybe all cameras, or lenses or… no, there are no ‘rights’ at play here at all because there is no life.

What happens here is that robot rights are revealed as a Trojan horse for repression of human rights, not at like the weak sophism of claims that granting of rights to animals or mountains would weaken the purity of human rights, but directly, materially and politically. Robot rights mean we can’t fight back. Robot rights mean we should sit by whilst life itself is made subordinate to capitalist technology. Robot rights are a bad argument and they are bad politics.