Person, Thing, Robot : A Moral and Legal Ontology for the 21st Century and Beyond

Why robots defy our existing moral and legal categories and how to revolutionize the way we think about them. Robots are a curious sort of thing. On the one hand, they are technological artifacts—and thus, things. On the other hand, they seem to have social presence, because they talk and interact with us, and simulate the capabilities commonly associated with personhood. In Person, Thing, Robot, David J. Gunkel sets out to answer the vexing question: What exactly is a robot? Rather than try to fit robots into the existing categories by way of arguing for either their reification or personification, however, Gunkel argues for a revolutionary reformulation of the entire system, developing a new moral and legal ontology for the twenty-first century and beyond. In this book, Gunkel investigates how and why efforts to use existing categories to classify robots fail, argues that “robot” designates an irreducible anomaly in the existing ontology, and formulates an alternative that restructures the ontological order in both moral philosophy and law. Person, Thing, Robot not only addresses the issues that are relevant to students, teachers, and researchers working in the fields of moral philosophy, philosophy of technology, science and technology studies (STS), and AI/robot law and policy but it also speaks to controversies that are important to AI researchers, robotics engineers, and computer scientists concerned with the social consequences of their work. Contents 7 Preface 11 Acknowledgments 15 1 Introduction 17 1.1 Robot Rights 18 1.2 The Debate 21 1.3 Terminology 23 1.4 Plan of Attack 25 1.5 Method of Analysis 27 1.6 Preview/Overview 33 1.7 Final Words 37 2 Things 39 2.1 What Is a Thing? 39 2.2 The Thing with Robots 43 2.3 Shared Assumptions and Difficulties 54 2.4 Outcomes and Results 63 3 Persons 65 3.1 What Is a Person? 66 3.2 What Are Rights? 72 3.3 Having Rights 74 3.4 Natural versus Artificial Persons 77 3.5 Outcomes and Results 85 4 Natural Persons 87 4.1 The Critics and Their Arguments 88 4.2 The Advocates and Their Arguments 95 4.3 Outcomes and Results 114 5 Artificial/Legal Persons 117 5.1 The Critics and Their Arguments 118 5.2 The Advocates and Their Arguments 136 5.3 Outcomes and Results 145 6 Both/And 149 6.1 Alternatives and Synthetic Solutions 151 6.2 Critical Problems and Complications 161 6.3 Other Solutions 167 6.4 Outcomes and Results 175 7 Deconstructing Things 177 7.1 Things Redux 178 7.2 An Ethics of Things 186 7.3 The Order of Things 198 Notes 201 Chapter 1 201 Chapter 2 203 Chapter 3 205 Chapter 4 206 Chapter 5 208 Chapter 6 210 Chapter 7 211 References 215 Index 241 "An argument for overturning the Kantian terms of rights and ethics in order to make progress on the robot rights debate"-- Provided by publisher