IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2016 - 50

Life, Liberty and the pursuit of happiness ... deriving
their powers from the consent of the governed" (Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776 [56]). In the passages above I want to emphasize how human rights
ideals recognize something intrinsic to the person
(endowed with spirit and conscience), and that such
rights are relational and given through relations with
others through "consent" or in the "spirit of brotherhood." Terms such as "brotherhood" and "all men are
created equal" reveal the double standards of the period, particularly with regards to the treatment of women
or people of color. For example, Thomas Jefferson who
penned and signed the Declaration of Independence
also owned slaves, and women were not immediately
emancipated. Despite the problematic context of the
U.S. declaration, human rights have served to challenge
regimes of power that endorse the privileges of some
groups over and above others, establishing that it is not
permissible to view a person as property, nor to treat
them as such under human rights law.
Aristotle, the father of "virtue" ethics took no issue
with slavery. Fortunately resistance to inequality is as
old as slavery itself, and Aristotle makes one reference
to it in The Politics writing "Others say that it is contrary
to nature to rule as master over slave, because the distinction between slave and free is one of convention
only, and in nature there is no difference, so that this
form of rule is based on force and is therefore not just"
[2, 1253b14]. Aristotle provided the "rationale" for a
system of inequality [57, p. 23], while giving little of the
accounts of others who resisted slavery [8]. We now
turn to Aristotle's justification for slavery, and the person as property.

Slavery and Robots: Humans as
Property and Property as Persons
Aristotle's reference to the slave as a tool is one that is
well known and sourced regularly in reference to AI and
robotics [10], [11], [21], [23]. To understand this contemporary dilemma, of how people are property and things
can take on the qualities of persons, Aristostle's Politics
holds important answers. Aristotle believed a slave was
a living tool and a living piece of property and drew
comparisons between an animate tool (slave) and an
inanimate tool (thing). It is worth citing at length what
he thought about human tools:
Tools may be animate as well as inanimate; for
instance, a ship's rudder uses a lifeless rudder,
but a living man for watch; for a servant is, from
the point of view of his craft, categorized as one
of its tools. So any piece of property can be
regarded as a tool enabling a man to live, and his
property is an assemblage of such tools; a slave is

a sort of living piece of property; and like any
other servant is a tool in charge of other tools. For
suppose that every tool could perform its task
either at our bidding or itself perceiving the need,
and if - like the statues made by Daedalus or the
tripods of Hephaestus, of which the poet says that
"self-moved they enter the assembly of the gods -
hustles in a loom could fly to and fro and a plucker
play a lyre of their own accord, then master-craftsmen would have no need of servants nor masters
of slaves" [2, pp. 64-65, 1253b23].
It is important to understand that slaves are not
machines. Bryson [7] has emphasized that machines
are appliances, objects, and these are different from
humans, but she draws on the language of slavery, and
therefore reproduces Aristotle's assumptions. The confusion about slave's nature stems from Aristotle's misunderstanding of a slave as an animate tool, because
slaves were never animate tools. How can we be sure
that slaves were not animate tools? Part of the answer
lies in resistance, the other in coercion. If humans were
"animate tools" they would not resist. But slaves did
resist their captivity, epitomized in the famous account
of Spartacus, the rebel slave who led an uprising against
the Roman Republic [58]. As described by Aristotle, slavery is a political system based on coercion and power.
Slavery is about the politics of power exercised over others with less power. It is this underlying idea of Aristotle's that is reproduced in AI and robotics. Here the
human can be a thing, and things can be humanlike.
While arguments for the rights of machines [55] and
robots [13] appear a progressive step on the road to
increasing the rights of others, the argument is based
on a fundamentally distorted idea of the human as
property, carried over into things. Arguments for sex
robots, drawn from and justified by reference to the
actual lived experiences of women as property, explicitly reveal these connections.
Even if we examine the histor y of the word
"machine" we find it less linked to the slave than to artificiality. We can move away from the idea of the
machine as a mechanical entity and return to its original
meaning in Greek which is "contrivance" (see http://
www.etymonline.com/index.php?term = machine).
What is a contrivance? It is something that is derived as
an outcome of artificiality. Over time the meaning of the
word developed. Only by the mid-1600s did the
machine become synonymous with mechanical and
power agents, as we understand them, and as more in
keeping with our vision today of a "device made of moving parts for applying mechanical power" (1670s).
If we examine the history of the word "robot" we also
find that mechanical agents are not the direct inspiration

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2016