Should We Root for Robot Rights?

Instead of worrying that robots will be our next overlords, they could teach us to be better humans

A few months ago, Saudi Arabia granted honorary citizenship to Sophia, a robot that’s smart enough to beat Jimmy Fallon at rock-paper-scissors and possibly motivated enough to ask Chrissy Teigen for makeup tips.

It was a poorly conceived public relations stunt for promoting a tech expo, and critics immediately clapped back. The uproar was predictable since the robot was given more rights than the region’s human women, who are prohibited from going out in public without a male guardian and must adhere to the state’s strict dress code.

If there’s a silver lining to the debacle, it’s this. The ridiculous affair got people thinking about an important philosophical question: Should robots ever be designed that deserve rights for real — genuine robot rights?

This is a complex question. It’s not another version of figuring out how to decide if awesome robots are owed something morally and legally special.

In the more familiar version of the problem, robots get the grand prize of rights for remarkable achievements: becoming fully autonomous, passing a hardcore Turing test, proving that they’re self-aware, or developing the capacity…