In an exclusive interview for AGI Ethics News, KB Miller sat down with philosopher David Gunkel to discuss the ethical implications of treating artificial general intelligence systems as “entities” and to explore a radical shift in how we approach the moral standing of artificial intelligence: the “relational turn.”
David J. Gunkel (PhD – DePaul University) is an award-winning author, educator, and researcher, specializing in the philosophy of technology with a focus on the moral and legal challenges of artificial intelligence and robots. He is a Professor of Media Studies and Department Chair at Northern Illinois University. He’s written numerous books, including Person, Thing, Robot and Robot Rights.
Due to the length of the interview, we’re splitting it into four parts.
In the final part of our four-part series, Gunkel examines the politics of rights, the limits of personhood frameworks, and why rethinking “things” may be key to navigating AGI ethics.
“Whenever you expand rights in this way, it’s an exercise of power… you’ve given yourself the power to extend rights to others.”
KB: Have you followed the Nature’s Rights movement at all?
DG: Interestingly, that’s kind of where I began with all of this. I came out of environmental ethics and wanted to see if it could be extended beyond the environment to the artifact. Which is why [Silvia] Benso was so pivotal for me. So, yes… and I’m very interested in the way that the rights of nature movement is using the construct of legal personhood, which was created for corporations, as a way of securing rights for nature, in the face of human devastation of environment. And I think it’s a very clever way of repurposing corporate law to protect the environment. And so, I’m very interested in those activities and what they’ve shown us.
KB: I think you’d be very interested in Mumta Ito’s organization. It’s called Nature’s Rights. It’s based in Scotland. Northern Scotland. And she’s a lawyer who came out of a very high-powered corporate environment and started Nature’s Rights to do what you might imagine. And they’re getting a hearing. This is now going to be debated on the floor of Parliament I gathered in the UK, as of just last month. Her vision is that you actually flip the whole Western tradition, legal tradition on its head. And nature’s rights is the umbrella concept, because nature is everything essentially, right? And so, then, environmental rights and human rights and AI rights became subsets of [the greater law].
DG: No, I like that, because the way that we proceeded up till this point is to say, “let’s extend what we know about human rights to animals or to the environment. And so it’s coming from a very human-centric perspective where we are judge and jury. We decide who gets rights. And Thomas Birch, who is a really interesting environmental ethicist, says that whenever you expand rights in this way, it’s an exercise of power. You’ve given yourself the power to extend rights to others. And that is a privileged position that you have given yourself. And I think this [flipping of the legal system] is an interesting way of challenging that.
KB: Could you expand on that for a minute, considering how property rights play in our world already, and how that might be an unfortunate determining factor in the world of AGI?
DG: Right, because this then goes back to the Lemoine affair in June of 2022, where Blake Lemoine is talking to LaMDA. And he gets convinced that LaMDA is conscious, that it’s a person, and he therefore goes to his employer, who is Google, and says the AI has achieved consciousness, and I would like to set it free, or whatever he wanted to do with that, and Google’s like, “No, no, it’s our property. It belongs to us. It’s a computer application. It’s no more conscious than your toaster. Get out of here.” And they go back and forth until finally Google fires Lemoine to end the entire debate.
“Let’s have measures of degree, so that you don’t have just personhood and thing, but you have degrees of personhood.”
But you can see in that conversation, or that debate, that both parties, are not only mobilizing the properties approach, because that’s the way they argued these things, by Lemoine saying “it’s conscious” and Google responding “no, it’s not.” But ultimately it gets resolved through power. It gets resolved not because Lemoine is shown to be wrong, but because Google says, we’re sick of talking to you, get out of here. And that means that in these debates, we’ve got to be really sensitive to who it is that has the power to resolve these things.
If it is the corporations that build, distribute and run these applications, getting them to give up their property, for one reason or another, is not something that is taken very easily. And so, this idea that in any situation where you’re extending recognitions and rights to others, there’s always going to be power and politics behind the scenes, and that knowing what those are in advance can, I think, help inform the way these conversations go. And knowing what’s at stake, and who the real players are in this kind of decision-making is crucial.
KB: And changing it.
DG: Hopefully. I was at Google, just this past November, so that was 2025. And Google convened a group of technologists, philosophers, legal scholars, etc., specifically to ask the question that Lemoine was dismissed for asking. And that’s a short period of time for a corporation to turn around on something they were pretty sure of. And we had a very long and complicated, two-day conversation about what it might mean to take seriously the possibility that something that is property now might not be property in the future. And what does that look like?
KB: You were there. Go back for a minute to the idea of some kind of graduated framework for AGI: is that an idea that is useful?
DG: One of the ways that we confront binaries is to say, when you’ve got a binary like person versus thing — which is the classic binary that we’re dancing around here — one way to resolve that is to say, well, let’s have a gradation. Let’s have measures of degree, so that you don’t have just personhood and thing, but you have degrees of personhood. And then AGI could achieve a certain gradation of personhood at some point, or an AI system might be not a full person, but a partial person of some degree, whatever the case is.
I think that sounds good, in terms of just practicality. And oftentimes in legal practice, that’s one of the ways these things are resolved. But I think it still keeps us within the confines of the person-thing dichotomy. Because these are just gradations in between those two extremes.
And my way of approaching this, especially in the book [Person, Thing, Robot] is to radicalize the way we think about the dichotomy itself. To say, what we need to do here is not open up the category of person to all these other things — corporations, and ships, and organizations, and AIs.
But maybe we need to radically rethink what a Thing is. And recognize a kinship among things, where we are also things. And that this kinship of things makes for not a flat ontology, but an ontology that is more attentive to the fact that there’s this shared materiality of all of us, whether it is an animal, a plant, a human, the earth, or the AIs that we construct.
And what would result from a thinking of things in this manner? This goes back to Benso again, remembering that Benso really is enamored with Heidegger’s thinking of the thing, which is not an object. It’s not an object for a subject. It’s outside that binary.
“I think law will proceed in the way that law has always proceeded. Legislative processes take place following a certain precedent.”
And I really want to use “Thing” to deconstruct the person-thing binary… to come up with some other ways of thinking about parsing reality in a way that makes sense for the exigencies of confronting the new capabilities and machines like we’re building.
KB: So, is that an education project for the judiciary, then, since we’re talking about doing this bottom up. Or is there a way to legislate that.
DG: I think neither.
KB: Okay, all right.
DG: I think law will proceed in the way that law has always proceeded. Legislative processes take place following a certain precedent. I think this is more of a change in a framework by which we think of those [ethical] challenges and as a result, confront the opportunities that are presented to us in the development of new laws, or in the decision-making that happens in the judiciary. I don’t think you’re going to be able to walk into the courtrooms and say, well, you guys should all be doing something different. The way you’re doing this is wrong. That’s not going to get you very far.
And so, I would say not so much of an education project, but a retooling project of the social mechanisms. And it’s a long game. This isn’t something that’s going to be accomplished overnight.
But I will say, I can see signs of interest in this way of thinking, not only among the young people that I deal with in the classroom, but I think when you start to look at how this plays out globally, you’re seeing responses to the way in which Western countries and dominant players in the Global North are talking about ethics, being challenged by other ways of thinking about these things from other parts of the world. And I think taking that seriously is part of the task before us.
KB: It might just be that environmental ethics is ahead of us by maybe five decades, say, on this subject, and might be a leader. Might Just lead us in that direction.
DG: Yes, I believe so. Yes, I believe so.
KB: Is that possible? Yes.
DG: If there are books that I recommend to my graduate and even undergraduate students, one is Benso [The Face of Things]. The other one is Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanac.
KB: Well, on so many levels, this has been an important conversation for me personally, and thank you, and thank you for sharing with our readers.
Maybe one final question is the question of agency. Is agency just another characteristic, then, that we should stay away from? Is it like consciousness, or does agency have a different place in this universe? How do you see that?
DG: Yes, there’s a lot. Obviously, there’s a lot of talk right now about AI agents and about agency and large language models. Again, I think we’ve got to be careful about how we understand agency.
“Agency happens whenever you create anything that has an effect on something beyond itself — that becomes an agent. ”
If we’re looking at agency as a kind of moral category: there’s a moral agent — and that’s what we are — and we take responsibility and are therefore accountable for our actions. Things like this. I think that’s a rather high bar for agency. But I think if we look at it from a lower perspective, a lower bar, let’s say, agency and patiency are, again, just two sides of the same coin. You have agents who act in the world, and you have patients who are acted upon.
And the way that we define, especially moral relationships, is we say that some agents have responsibilities to patients, who can suffer or be benefited by the actions taken by an agent. So I don’t think we can avoid agency. We can’t say, let’s not do agency. Agency happens whenever you create anything that has an effect on something beyond itself — that becomes an agent.
And so, I think we’ve got to be serious about how we define agency but also recognize that agency is not a thing that we can either decide to be for or against. It is something that will be part of any kind of social interactions where you have one social entity affecting another.
And I think the conversation about AI and ethics has to look at AI not only as a potential agent, but also as a potential patient, and understand not only what its responsibilities are or could be, but what our responsibilities are to it.
KB: That would be consonant with the idea of looking at user behavior, in particular, right?
DG: Yes. Correct.
KB: Thank you.
DG: Yes, thank you. Great questions.
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