The ethics of robot servitude

Suppose we could build creatures with intelligence comparable to our own, who by design want to do tasks we find unpleasant. May we build such creatures? This is the central question I wish to examine. Before we turn to my answer and its defense, though, I’d like briefly to consider something philosophers typically do not stop to consider: namely, why we might ask the question in the first place. The question is, first of all, a natural and engaging one. When I discuss the possibility of artificial intelligence with undergraduates, they immediately begin to wonder about whether they might have robot servants in their lifetime, and this leads them immediately to the question of whether they should have them. The association is understandable, given the prevalence of robot servants in pop culture. To pick some references from my own cultural frame, there’s C3PO and R2D2 from Star Wars, Marvin in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Rosie from The Jetsons, HAL from 2001, and “Robot” from Lost in Space. Much of the Twilight Zone corpus is dedicated to robot labor. More recently there’s Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation, Bender from Futurama, and the host of robots in the Kubrick-Spielberg movie A.I. Disgruntled robot servants are at the heart of the Matrix plotline (as the backstory in Animatrix makes clear). Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot series simply assumes that intelligent robots should be programmed as our servants; it’s written into Asimov’s famous “3 laws of robotics”.1