How Robots Have Politics

Abstract

In an influential essay, published in the 1980s, philosopher of technology Langdon Winner (1980), asked, ‘Do artefacts have politics?’ His answer, confirmed by subsequent decades of science and technology studies, was a resounding ‘Yes!’ Artefacts have political choices embedded in their design and entrench these politics in their applications. Moreover, because technologies are better suited to serving some ends rather than others, artefacts shape the societies in which they are developed by shaping the circumstances of their own use. This chapter explores how robots have politics and how those politics are relevant to their ethics. It suggests that, for a number of reasons, robots have more politics than do other sorts of artefacts.