  Critical examinations of AI systems often apply principles such as fairness,
justice, accountability, and safety, which is reflected in AI regulations such
as the EU AI Act. Are such principles sufficient to promote the design of
systems that support human flourishing? Even if a system is in some sense fair,
just, or 'safe', it can nonetheless be exploitative, coercive, inconvenient, or
otherwise conflict with cultural, individual, or social values. This paper
proposes a dimension of interactional ethics thus far overlooked: the ways AI
systems should treat human beings. For this purpose, we explore the
philosophical concept of respect: if respect is something everyone needs and
deserves, shouldn't technology aim to be respectful? Despite its intuitive
simplicity, respect in philosophy is a complex concept with many disparate
senses. Like fairness or justice, respect can characterise how people deserve
to be treated; but rather than relating primarily to the distribution of
benefits or punishments, respect relates to how people regard one another, and
how this translates to perception, treatment, and behaviour. We explore respect
broadly across several literatures, synthesising perspectives on respect from
Kantian, post-Kantian, dramaturgical, and agential realist design perspectives
with a goal of drawing together a view of what respect could mean for AI. In so
doing, we identify ways that respect may guide us towards more sociable
artefacts that ethically and inclusively honour and recognise humans using the
rich social language that we have evolved to interact with one another every
day.
