Equal Rights! Equal Rights!
It's time to start thinking about how we might grant legal rights to computers.
By Benjamin Soskis
According to Wendell Wallach, co-author of the forthcoming book Robot Morality, corporations that own computers and robots might seek to encourage a belief in their autonomy in order to escape liability for their actions. “Insurance pressures might move us in the direction of computer systems being considered as moral agents,” Wallach notes. Given the close association between rights and responsibilities in legal and ethical theory, such a move might also lead to a consideration of legal personhood for computers. The best way to push back against the pressures to treat computers as autonomous would be to think carefully about what moral agency for a computer would mean, how we might be able to determine it, and the implications of that determination for our interaction with machines.