Do Machines Have Rights? Ethics in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

David J. Gunkel was a keynote speaker for “Identity, Agency, and the Digital Nexus”, April 2013, SSHRC funded international symposium hosted by Athabasca University. His talk challenged the audience to reframe and rethink the “human-machine” binary in 21st century understandings of ethics and agency. Later that year we met over Skype to talk about some of the points raised in his presentation, and other key ideas embedded in his 2012 publication, The Machine Question: Critical Perspectives on AI, Robots and Ethics. Gunkel is the Presidential Teaching Professor of Communication Studies at Northern Illinois University. The symposium was funded by a Connection Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and organized by Dr. Raphael Foshay, MA-IS Program Director at Athabasca University.