Artificial Intelligence (AI) has inspired a remarkable transformation in Intelligent Humanoid Robots (IHRs), making them interact with individuals in human-like manners, simulate human-like conversation and appear as if they were intelligent beings. These human replicas might pose great potential impacts on their human rights, e.g., the right to privacy and non-discrimination.
The thesis explores the relevant ethical and human rights issues in the context of IHRs, which the AI and human rights literature has not yet adequately addressed. It argues that the aesthetics, presence in private spaces, and the perception of IHRs by individuals as animate beings, pose threats and afford opportunities for human rights and ethical values, particularly privacy as broadly understood. It argues that IHRs have the potential to exploit human vulnerabilities for, e.g., the elderly and individuals with physical and mental disabilities. Thus, they deserve a particular attention from the human rights scholarship.
The thesis contributes to the AI and human rights literature in three interrelated ways:
- It creates a classification of privacy to provide a comprehensive understanding of how privacy is impacted by IHRs. This classification includes elements such as informational, physical, mental, and social privacy, among others.
- It presents qualitative interviews with leading technologists, roboticists, and AI experts to gain insight into the present and potential trajectory of IHRs. The findings of these interviews reveal the following issues: 1) growing concerns about the urgency to understand the ramifications of AI/IHRs on human rights, 2) human-centric AI was considered as an appropriate approach to supervise the development of IHRs/AI, and 3) regulating AI/IHRs was preferred by most of the interviewees.
- Based on this analysis, it proposes a Human Rights-Centred Approach, which it considers as a unifying universal approach to design and deploy human rights-respecting IHRs. It suggests that: 1) human rights can inform us of the challenges and opportunities raised by IHRs, and 2) human rights must be at the core of the design and development of IHRs.