Robotic Personhood: The Role of Public Engagement in Informing the Legal and Ethical Standing of Robots

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This doctoral project will examine the role public engagement can play in informing the direction of ethical, political and policy debates about the assignment of legal personhood to robots in the United Kingdom. I will investigate this in three different ways: I will begin by mapping the on-going debate on machines and personhood in the context of the sociology of artificial intelligence (AI). I will then perform a detailed review of relevant examples of recent experiments in public engagement with robots, and analyse how these have framed and impacted the public understanding of robotics, and its legal, social and ethical aspects, including personhood. This research will inform the construction of my own participatory experiment, which will draw on interdisciplinary approaches in science and technology studies (STS) and design research, and deploy a robotic entity to prompt engagement. My experiment will both examine and create interfaces between public and expert debates about robotic personhood. I am especially concerned to investigate the extent to which public participation can inform policy about this aspect of our technological, social and legal future.