Law Commons^™

Robophobia, Andrew Keane Woods

University of Colorado Law Review

Robots-machines, algorithms, artificial intelligence-play an increasingly important role in society, often supplementing or even replacing human judgment. Scholars have rightly become concerned with the fairness, accuracy, and humanity of these systems. Indeed, anxiety about machine bias is at a fever pitch. While these concerns are important, they nearly all run in one direction: we worry about robot bias against humans; we rarely worry about human bias against robots.

This is a mistake. Not because robots deserve, in some deontological sense, to be treated fairly-although that may be true-but because our bias against nonhuman deciders is bad for us. For example, …