Robot rights? Let’s talk about human welfare instead

Some advocate for granting robots rights on a par with human beings, while others, in a stark opposition, argue that robots are not deserving of rights but are objects that should be our slaves. Grounded in post-Cartesian philosophical foundations, we argue not just to deny robots ‘rights’, but to also assert that robots are not the kinds of things that could be granted rights in the first place. Once we see robots as mediators of human beings, we can understand how the ‘robots rights’ debate is focused on first-world problems at the expense of urgent ethical concerns, such as human labour exploitation, normalisation of surveillance, and harms from flawed systems. We conclude that if human beings are our starting point and human welfare is the primary concern, the negative impacts emerging from machinic systems and the lack of accountability from the creators and vendors of these systems remain the most pressing ethical discussions in AI.