Sex robot advocacy - the marriage of racial thinking and corporate personhood
In December 2016, the second edition of the Love and Sex With Robots congress was held in London. It was chaired by David Levy, one of the most cited persons in the field of robotic ‘love’ and ‘sex’. In the lecture “Why Not Marry a Robot?” Levy puts marriage with robots on a par with the history of interracial marriage and even claims there is “no sufficient reason to deny robots the same rights and protections as humans”. I see quite some reasons to deny that – in this essay, I elaborate on some of them.
From corporate to commodity personhood
“As more and more people have come to accept the concepts of love and sex with robots, so society as a whole will develop laws that govern human-robot relationships. And as those laws evolve, the type of legal restriction which prevented Angela Marie Vogel from obtaining a legally valid marriage license in Seattle, to allow her to marry a corporation - such laws will begin to fall by the wayside. Just as the laws preventing interracial marriage did in the 1960s and those relating to same-sex marriage have done during the current decade.”
A big part of Levy’s recent speech is a rewriting of the history of same-sex and interracial unions - and a reflection on the future of human - object relationships. In his words, the 2012 marriage of Angela Marie Vogel to a corporation or specifically, Corporate Person, was repealed as the Court ruled there was no consent involved in the act.
The pastor at the marriage told the visitors: “For Angela, dear, sweet victim of corporate propaganda, she has been swept up in a love that knows no boundaries, nor limits, no moral concerns …”
In fact, Angela Vogel is not a technofetishist, but an anti-corporate activist. The marriage of Corporate Person and Angela Vogel was a provocation by an initiative active in the context of Occupy Seattle that wanted to elevate citizens’ rights beyond the rights of corporations. Their proposal was a reaction to Mitt Romney’s statement on the legal fiction that states that corporations are people.
The legal history of corporate personhood goes back to the abolishment of slavery and the humanisation of corporations needed to maintain the privileges of We the People, white and wealthy men. In 1886, the Fourteenth Amendment gave constitutional rights to people born and naturalised in the U.S. However, property owners abused anti-discrimination laws for their own agenda even before women and blacks got the right to vote, by privileging the corporations.
Corporate personhood is a legal doctrine from the late 19th century and an unfortunate result of the successful fights of the abolitionists. Amendments to the US Constitution questioned who or what is characterized as a person and worthy of equal protection by the law. But when corporations were defined as metaphysical persons, they worked in favour of the wealthy white men, not former slaves, as they gave rights, and thus uplifted, corporations - the institutions that were owned by white and wealthy men only.
“Slavery is the legal fiction that a person is property. Corporate personhood is the legal fiction that property is a person. Like abolishing slavery, the work of eradicating corporate personhood takes us to the deepest questions of what it means to be human.” (Hammerstrom 2002).
Reading David Levy’ s references to gay or lesbian marriage and interracial marriages together with this historical context, one senses their perverse instrumentalisation for the rights of robots - commodities. His argumentation is, like other enlightened justifications, Universal, ahistorical or historically selective, and taken out of context. His is an attempt to grant political rights to a commodity, an artefact. It is a logical next step from granting corporations the freedom of speech rights, which happened in 2011 (Citizens United case).
Designing the Other
“By the time there are no laws to prevent human-robot marriages, robots will be patient, kind, protective, loving, trusting, truthful, persevering, respectful, uncomplaining, complementary, pleasant to talk to, and sharing your sense of humour. And the robots of the future will not be jealous, boastful, arrogant, rude, self-seeking or easily angered. Unless of course, you want them to be.”
Robots, at least the ones envisioned by Levy, are perfect beings on command. But having relations with flesh-and-blood others is not supposed to be a non-consensual Master-slave relationship.
Levy’s description of robot characteristics one hears twice in the talk reminded me of Michael Taussig’s (1993, 105) words: “through detailed description, power is gained over the thing described”. Taussig analyses the colonial mentality and imagination, and the lack of relational thinking associated with it. He delves into commodity economy, which “has displaced persons, if not into things then into copies of things flaring with life of their own” (Taussig 1993, 231).
Social robots are a striking example of capitalist progress, and a symptom of the alienating historical development. The prosperity which enabled such progress is built on colonialism and slavery, and races were designed to maintain hierarchies. In social robotics, capital investment is abused for classist and elitist reasons: to construct another race, another species, to design a perfect(able) personhood.
Moreover, the marketing of the (un)dead Others is not at all concerned with the alive Others who suffer and die for our gadgets. Levy’s concerns venture elsewhere: “when robot creatures are generally perceived as being similar to biological creatures, the effect on society will be enormous. It will be as though hordes of people from a hitherto-unknown and far-off land have emigrated to our shores, a people who behave like us in many ways but who are very clearly different.” (Levy 2009, 303)
Referring to migrants as people composing hordes is problematic in its own way. Moreover, turning the attention, and sensibility, towards gadgets, robots or other programmable devices, can be read as a dehumanisation of migrants and refugees, as well as any other human beings not recognised as such.
Who values values
Josef Čapek, the man who invented the world robot
- meaning a forced worker - died in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
The racist and classist imaginary accompanying the discourse on love and sex with robots is not in line with his, and his brother Karel Čapek’s, emancipatory ideas from Rossum’s Universal Robots (R.U.R). The brothers have agreed that love is the unconstructed, random bit. They devised a societal critique that should be taken seriously. R.U.R. is a critique of materialism and progress measured in terms of efficiency, and we live in an era when societal change is seen in terms of technological progress, not global prosperity.
Development of companions and love partners with proposed personhood is perverse. It is clearly a follow-up to the corporate intrusion into human rights, personhood and interpersonal relations. Commodity personhood is a legal fiction and a tool of domination by the predominately white, male and wealthy, just as it was with the birth of corporate personhood.
Reading through relational, not instrumental ethics; neither robots nor algorithms will ever love you, do you, or teach you how to care for anything else than commodities.
It is not belief in organised religion, neither limitless science, but belief in the diverse humans and humanity free of slavery and class, which nudges one to(wards) love.
References
Levy, David. 2009. Love and sex with robots: The evolution of human-robot relationships. London: Duckworth Overlook.
Taussig, Michael. 1993. Mimesis and Alterity: A particular history of the senses. New York and London: Routledge.
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