Robot Rights

Robot Rights is a compelling read. It dives deeply into philosophy from the very start, but it’s accessible and well structured, and useful and informative for anyone interested in the social impact of emerging technologies. ~TIMES HIGHER EDUCATION

...a brilliantly, disorienting book. ~Daily Telegraph

Robot Rights is a crucial innovation in the way we think about our proper place in the world and relationships with entities of our own making. ~LSE Review of Books

Gunkel elegantly deals with how and whether we can understand human rights so as to apply them to nonhuman entities, particularly automata. [... ] [A] keen investigation into whether automata could have rights much like humans. ~Human Rights Watch

“Robots are a new kind of entity, not quite alive and yet something more than machines. Gunkel’s book dissects the question of whether robots should have rights from every angle, setting the stage for what may become the most important ethical debate of this century.” ~Tony Prescott, Professor of Cognitive Robotics, University of Sheffield

If the report of the European Parliament only considered legal consequences of the development of robotics, Mr. Gunkel draws an accurate picture of the impact of the expansion of robots in our social relationships. Going beyond usual stereotypes of science fiction, this book is a deep reflection on how we want to shape our future, which place we want to assign to robots and how we want to deal with them in our daily lives. It is not simply about what kind of robots we want in our society but also about what kind of human we want to be. ~Mady Delvaux-Stehres, Luxemburgish S&D Member of the European Parliament