Artificial intelligence is writing essays, winning at chess, detecting likely cancers and making business decisions. That’s just the beginning for a technology that will only grow more powerful and pervasive, bolstering longstanding worries that robots might someday overtake us.
Yet far less attention has been paid to how we should treat these new forms of intelligence, some of which will be embodied in increasingly anthropomorphic forms. Might we eventually owe them some kind of moral or legal rights? Might we feel we should treat them like people if they look and act the part?
If robots get any rights at all, Dr. [David J.] Gunkel says, first to come will be basic protections of the kind that exist in many places against cruelty toward animals. Like animals, robots could be seen as what philosophers call “moral patients,” or beings worthy of moral consideration whether or not they can fulfill the duties and responsibilities of “moral agents.” Your dog is a moral patient, and so are you. But you are also a moral agent—someone who is able to tell right from wrong and act accordingly.
