Do Robots Deserve the Right to Unionize? (Part Three)

As shown in Part Two, where the common person recognized Andrew’s sentience, and thus deserving of every human right, the court refused to accept that society was ready to recognize the sentience of robots due to Andrew’s immortality. While this certainly brings up other important questions, like how courts or governments will react to our species achieving “immortality” – or better termed, indefinite life extension – for now we’ll stick with the question of robots and their attaining basic living and working rights.

According to Article 23 of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

• Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.
• Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work.
• Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection.
• Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests.

And according to the United Nations’ International Labour Organization, “The freedoms to associate and to bargain collectively are fundamental rights.”

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights still adheres to the biased outlook of sentience being everything Human. This will become a struggle in itself, and likely will spark another Civil Rights movement in similar magnitudes as seen during the Civil Rights marches for African-American rights, for Women’s rights, and as we’re currently witnessing for the rights of immigrants.

Robotic rights will be one of the greatest questions asked in the 21^st century. Protests will emerge, riots will erupt, conflicts between robot-rights advocates and neo-Luddites will be aroused. Making this question all the more complex and controversial, and yet no robot has yet acquired sentience and gone before the courts to validate it.