  In this work we challenge arguments for robot rights on metaphysical, ethical
and legal grounds. Metaphysically, we argue that machines are not the kinds of
things that may be denied or granted rights. Building on theories of
phenomenology and post-Cartesian approaches to cognitive science, we ground our
position in the lived reality of actual humans in an increasingly ubiquitously
connected, controlled, digitized, and surveilled society. Ethically, we argue
that, given machines current and potential harms to the most marginalized in
society, limits on (rather than rights for) machines should be at the centre of
current AI ethics debate. From a legal perspective, the best analogy to robot
rights is not human rights but corporate rights, a highly controversial concept
whose most important effect has been the undermining of worker, consumer, and
voter rights by advancing the power of capital to exercise outsized influence
on politics and law. The idea of robot rights, we conclude, acts as a smoke
screen, allowing theorists and futurists to fantasize about benevolently
sentient machines with unalterable needs and desires protected by law. While
such fantasies have motivated fascinating fiction and art, once they influence
legal theory and practice articulating the scope of rights claims, they
threaten to immunize from legal accountability the current AI and robotics that
is fuelling surveillance capitalism, accelerating environmental destruction,
and entrenching injustice and human suffering.
