Does artificial intelligence (AI) have rights? A plausible answer depends on the answer to another question: Is AI capable of experiencing emotions, such as sadness, pleasure, regret, anxiety, joy, and distress? A negative answer to that question means that AI lacks moral rights and that it is not entitled to legal rights (though such rights might be granted for instrumental reasons). It follows that if and when AI has emotions, it has moral rights, and it should be entitled to legal rights as well.
The capacity to experience emotions can be seen as a necessary and sufficient condition for the recognition and conferral of rights. That conclusion might be rejected by those who emphasise (for example) a capacity for self-awareness or an ability to reason. A focus on emotions also leaves open the question of what rights AI has, supposing that it has rights, and the grounds on which its rights might be defeasible.
Professor Cass R. Sunstein, Founder and Director of the Behavioural Economics and Public Policy program at Harvard Law School, focusing on addressing AI, bias and noise in administrative agencies during his time on the programme. He is also senior inaugural fellow of the Accelerator Fellowship Programme.