Cory Doctorow used his July 10 Pluralistic essay to attack a corner of AI discourse that usually presents itself as speculative ethics: the campaign or thought experiment around rights for robots. His argument is not that machines are close to deserving legal personhood. It is that talking as if they might be helps AI vendors sell executives a fantasy of labor without workers who complain, resist, need pay, or need bathroom breaks.
Doctorow frames the current AI boom as both material and ideological. On the material side, he says the pitch works because managers are receptive to claims that software can replace employees. On the ideological side, he argues AI promises bosses a workplace with fewer people who can tell them that a plan is unsafe, unlawful, or impossible.
The mechanism, in his telling, is not magic automation. It is labor displacement plus labor hiding. Doctorow says companies can fire staff on the claim that AI will do the work, leaving the remaining employees under pressure because other workers need the job. He also points to outsourced “human in the loop” operations, where remote workers perform or supervise tasks that customers and managers experience as automated.
Doctorow describes that model as an illusion: software appears to act alone while low-paid workers, including overseas call-center workers, are made invisible. He uses the phrase “Absent Indians” for systems sold as AI that depend on people pretending to be robots. The point is blunt, and not subtle: if a product depends on human judgment, fatigue, correction, or intervention, the labor did not vanish. It moved somewhere easier to ignore.
Why robot rights enter the argument
Doctorow then turns to moral status. People, he writes, demand consideration for their health, feelings, pay, and bodily needs. Machines do not. That difference is what makes automation attractive to employers seeking obedience rather than negotiation.
He links that to slavery, defining it as labor stripped of moral consideration. In his view, the strongest AI sales pitch is not only that bosses can replace people with tools. It is that they can acquire a new category of worker that behaves like a person when useful and like property when inconvenient.
The essay also criticizes parts of the AI safety world. Doctorow says existential-risk arguments pull attention away from weaker economics, worse output, and systems that fail to do the work of the people they displace. He calls the idea of a word-prediction system becoming a superintelligence an absurd thought experiment, while arguing that treating it as a serious existential threat makes the technology look powerful and therefore valuable.
Nature, corporations and personhood
Doctorow acknowledges one argument for extending rights beyond humans: campaigns for animal welfare and rights for nature, he says, have helped humans by forcing broader moral and legal concern for living systems. He contrasts that with corporate personhood, which he describes as harmful to human welfare and the environment.
That distinction drives his warning about AI personhood. Rights for nature, in Doctorow’s account, can restrain corporations. Rights for corporations strengthen artificial legal entities against humans and nature. He argues that giving AI a comparable moral or legal status would likely resemble corporate personhood rather than environmental rights.
His final claim is that “rights for robots” does the AI industry’s sales work for it. Once chatbots are discussed as potential persons, the workplace systems bought by employers can be imagined as people. If those “people” are still treated as entities owed no consideration, Doctorow says the metaphor points straight back to slavery. For him, the robot-rights campaign does not challenge the AI labor fantasy. It validates the premise that the product is an obedient worker without claims on anyone else.
This story draws on original reporting from Pluralistic.
