The continuing advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) provides many unique and troubling ethical issues concerning the boundaries that demarcate a robot from a human being, and whether the former is worthy of any moral considerations. Notably, the potential roboticisation of the sex trade, and the introduction of nascent AI poses the question of whether a weak form of AI can be properly considered to consent. Within this essay, I will look at attempts to avoid this problem by stripping weak AI of moral worth, arguing that as this cannot be done in a satisfactory way the issue must be confronted head on.
In the first part of this essay I will look at appeals to the intuition that it is ‘just’ an object, and thus not worthy of any ethical consideration or capacity to consent. Highlighting how this solution is not only unsatisfactory, but unreflective of developing technological trends, I will then turn in the second part to whether appeals to animal rights can be turned in favour of attributing moral worth to weak AI. As this is a short essay, I will touch on a number of issues relating to AI and the sex trade only briefly, including the objectification of women, in relation to our perceptions of weak AI.
Weak AI as ‘just’ an object
It seems intuitive to consider weak AI, which includes the likes of Siri, smart furniture and internet chatbots, as purely object. The idea of granting moral consideration to a kettle, no matter how sophisticated, appears at first absurd. Often classified explicitly as non-sentient, weaker variants of AI are programmed to focus on a narrow range of tasks, without ‘understanding’ their actions. Even if it can pass the Turing test, it is only emulating human experience, not doing anything more than processing an algorithm (Searle, 1999). In this sense, w
