#66: Should AI Have Rights? | David J. Gunkel

Can a machine be wronged? Should a robot ever be treated as more than property? In this episode of The Prometheans, we sit down with philosopher David J. Gunkel — the scholar who, more than anyone alive, has made "robot rights" a serious philosophical question rather than a punchline.

David Gunkel is Presidential Research, Scholarship, and Artistry Professor in the Department of Communication at Northern Illinois University and a professor at Lazarski University in Warsaw, Poland. He is the author of over a dozen books, including "The Machine Question" (2012), "Robot Rights" (2018), and — most recently — "Communicative AI: A Critical Introduction to Large Language Models" (2025) and "Understanding Artificial Intelligence" (2026).

In this conversation, we go straight at the hardest version of the question:

— Why do the traditional "properties" that supposedly qualify something for moral status (reason, sentience, consciousness) keep moving their own goalposts throughout history?

— What's the real philosophical difference between asking whether AI CAN have rights and whether it SHOULD?

— Why does Gunkel turn to Levinas and Derrida to argue that ethics might not require verifying anyone's "inner life" at all — including other humans'?

— Is granting machines moral status a step toward justice, or — as critics like Joanna Bryson argue — a dangerous distraction that lets us dehumanize real people?

— What changes, if anything, now that the "machine" in question can fluently argue for its own rights, the way ChatGPT and other LLMs can?

This is not a hypothetical, sci-fi conversation. It's a rigorous philosophical examination of where the line between "tool" and "someone" actually sits — and why so much rides on getting that line right.

Whether you think the idea of AI rights is obviously absurd or obviously overdue, this episode will make you defend your position more carefully than you did before you hit play.