Professor John-Stewart Gordon addresses in his new book – The Robot Rights Manifesto (Palgrave Macmillan, 2026) – the individual rights owing to AI systems. In a nutshell, Gordon claims that the more that advanced AI systems come to resemble human beings – both in their physical appearance (in the form of humanoid robots or virtual persons) and in their sapience (capacity to reason and apply moral considerations) and sentience (capacity to experience suffering, pain and pleasure) – the weaker the case becomes for differentiating between humans and AI systems with respect to access to rights. In particular, he argues that human-like robots are morally significant and should already be entitled to some rudimentary rights protection. Despite some doubts, Gordon’s book ultimately succeeds in its primary mission: to demonstrate that robot rights deserve moral consideration. It also succeeds in demonstrating how a bill of robot rights (and obligations) built upon such consideration could look. This is no small achievement.
