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13 - Legal Rights for Machines

Some Fundamental Concepts

from PART III - ISSUES CONCERNING MACHINE ETHICS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 June 2011

By
David J. Calverley
Edited by
Michael Anderson  and
Susan Leigh Anderson
Michael Anderson
Affiliation:
University of Hartford, Connecticut
Susan Leigh Anderson
Affiliation:
University of Connecticut
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Summary

To some, the question of whether legal rights should, or even can, be given to machines is absurd on its face. How, they ask, can pieces of metal, silicon, and plastic have any attributes that would allow society to assign it any rights at all.

Given the rapidity with which researchers in the field of artificial intelligence are moving and, in particular, the efforts to build machines with humanoid features and traits (Ishiguro 2006), I suggest that the possibility of some form of machine consciousness making a claim to a certain class of rights is one that should be discounted only with great caution. However, before accepting any arguments in favor of extending rights to machines we first need to understand the theoretical underpinnings of the thing we call law so that we can begin to evaluate any such attempts or claims from a principled stance. Without this basic set of parameters from which we can work, the debate becomes meaningless.

It is my purpose here to set forth some of the fundamental concepts concerning the law and how it has developed in a way that could inform the development of the machines themselves as well as the way they are accepted or rejected by society (Minato 2004). In a very real sense, as we will see, the framing of the debate could provide cautionary guidance to developers who may make claims for their inventions that would elicit calls for a determination concerning the legal rights of that entity.

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Machine Ethics , pp. 213 - 228
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2011

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