Whether we recognize it as such or not, we are in the midst of a robot invasion. The machines are now everywhere and doing virtually everything. We chat with them online, we play with them in digital games, we collaborate with them at work, and we rely on their capabilities to manage many aspects of our increasingly complex data-driven lives. Consequently, the “robot invasion” is not something that will transpire as we have imagined it in our science fiction, with a marauding army of evil-minded androids descending from the heavens. It is an already occurring event with machines of various configurations and capabilities coming to take up positions in our world through a slow but steady incursion. It looks less like Battlestar Galactica and more like the Fall of Rome.
Some statistics: Industrial Robots (IRs) have slowly but steadily been invading our work places since the mid-1970s, and this infiltration has, in recent years, appeared to have accelerated to impressive levels. As S. M. Solaiman (2017, 156) recently reported: “The International Federation for Robotics (IFR) in a 2015 report on IRs found an increase in the usage of robots by 29% in 2014, which recorded the highest sales of 229,261 units for a single year (IFR 2015). IFR estimates that about 1.3 million new IRs will be employed to work alongside humans in factories worldwide between 2015 and 2018 (IFR 2015). IFR has termed this remarkable increase as ‘conquering the world’ by robots (IFR 2015).” In addition to these industrial applications, there are also “service robots,” which are characterized as machines involved in “entertaining and taking care of children and elderly people, preparing food and cooking in restaurants, cleaning residential premises, and milking cows” (Cookson 2015). There are, according to data provided by the Foundation for Responsible Robotics, 12 million service robot currently in operation across the globe, and the IFR predicts “an exponential rise” with the population of service robots expected to reaching 31 million units by 2018 (Solaiman 2017, 156).
We also are seeing a significant increase in the number and types of “social robots,” like the PARO therapy robot, Jibo, “the world’s first family robot,” and the other tabletop assistants like Amazon’s Echo/Alexa and Google Home. These devices are a subset of service robots specifically designed for human social interaction. And the predictions for these social robots exceed both IRs and service robots, with countries like South Korea aiming to put a robot in every home by 2020 (Lovgren 2006). Finally, there are distributed systems like the Internet of Things (IoT), where numerous connected devices “work together” to make an automated arrangement that is not “a robot” in the typical sense of the word but a network of interacting and smart devices. The Internet is already overrun, if not entirely run, by machines, with better than 50% of all online activity being machine generated and consumed (Zeifman 2017), and it is now estimated that IoT will support over 26 billion interactive and connected devices by 2020 (by way of comparison, the current human population of planet earth is estimated to be 7.4 billion) (Gartner 2013).
As these various mechanisms take up increasingly influential positions in contemporary culture—positions where they are not necessarily just tools or instruments of human action but a kind of interactive social entity in their own right—we will need to ask ourselves some rather interesting but difficult questions. At what point might a robot, algorithm, or other autonomous system be held accountable for the decisions it makes or the actions it initiates? When, if ever, would it make sense to say, “It’s the robot’s fault”? Conversely, when might a robot, an intelligent artifact, or other socially interactive mechanism be due some level of social standing or respect? When, in other words, would it no longer be considered nonsense to inquire about the rights of robots?—and to ask the question: “Can and should robots have rights?”
Although considerable effort has already been expended on the question of robots and responsibility, the other question, the question of robot rights, remains conspicuously absent or at least marginalized. In fact, for most people, “the notion of robots having rights is unthinkable,” as David Levy (2005, 393) has asserted. This book is designed as both a provocation and thoughtful response to this apparent “fact.” It is, therefore, deliberately designed to think the unthinkable by critically considering and making (or venturing to make) a serious philosophical case for the rights of robots. It does so not to be controversial, even if controversy is often the result of this kind of philosophical intervention, but in order to respond to some very real and pressing challenges concerning emerging technology and the current state of and future possibilities for moral reasoning.