This review by Alexander Guerrero has now been published in Critical AI at this link https://read.dukeupress.edu/critical-ai/article/doi/10.1215/2834703X-12096018/406200/Person-Thing-Robot-A-Moral-and-Legal-Ontology-for; an extract is pasted in below. If your institution lacks access to Critical AI please encourage them to subscribe. If you are an independent scholar please write to criticalai@sas.rutgers.edu.
EXTRACT:
In this elegantly written but frustrating book, David Gunkel presents a dichotomy between “persons” and “things”—a dichotomy that he claims “has organized both law and ethics for close to two millennia” (21)—and then considers the question, Which box should “robots” go in, the person box or the thing box? Finding both options wanting, he ends by offering “the terms and conditions” of a “deconstructive” alternative approach, “in an effort to respond to the alterity that is manifest in the face of the robot” (21).
I found the book frustrating for many reasons; here are four of them.
First, it is unclear what Gunkel means by “robot.” This is surprising given that the whole book is kind of about robots: how we should view them, treat them, and the supposed trouble they make for our ordinary moral and legal thinking. He says three things about what a robot is. First, he…