We are living through an era of increased robotization, with robots becoming integrated into settings such as factories, hospitals, transportation systems, military, workplaces, households and healthcare. But what are the social and moral implications arising from our interpersonal connections with robots? Can robots have significant moral status? Can we be friends with a robot? When your robot lover tells you that it loves you, should you believe it? In this conversation, philosopher of technology John Danaher considers whether we are robots ourselves; whether we should understand our relationships with robots by analogy with non-human animals; whether robot friendships can complement and possibly enhance human friendships; whether robots have an inner life; whether robots are capable of deceiving us; and much more.

JOHN DANAHER is a Senior Lecturer in Law at the National University of Ireland (NUI) Galway. He researches on a wide range of topics at the interface of philosophy, law and technology, and he is host of the popular “Philosophical Disquisitions” podcast.

ANTHONY MORGAN is editor of The Philosopher and commissioning editor for philosophy at Agenda Publishing.

Anthony Morgan (AM): In an interview, the philosopher Kevin O’Regan said that he believes he is a robot, and, furthermore, that people get upset when he tells them that they are robots because they feel that they’re persons and not robots. He goes on to say that the fact that he is a robot doesn't mean that he doesn't suffer pain or fall in love or appreciate art. It just means that there are no “magical mechanisms” explaining these phenomena, such as free will. What insights do you think we can glean from thinking about whether we are robots ourselves?

John Danaher (JD): I consider our world to be a collection of mechanistic structures knitted together in very complicated ways, and so we are in principle very sophisticated mechanisms. Hence if we can create mechanisms that are as sophisticated as us – they may not be exactly functionally equivalent but they may behave and act in much the same way – then they can have all the qualities and attributes that we have, and possibly others too. Thus there's no reason for me to think that we can't create general artificial intelligence or robots that are effectively the same as humans.

Misanthropy – the moral condemnation of humankind – is very topical these days. There are many inspirations for a sense of the collective awfulness of humankind, from the failures to act on the global environmental crisis to the rise of far-right ideologies to the avoidable mass suffering of billions of humans and animals. But philosophers rarely talk about misanthropy as a doctrine. When they do, it is usually narrowly defined as a hatred of human beings or coupled to extreme proposals. In this conversation, Ian James Kidd offers an overview of philosophical misanthropy, including his own definition (“the systematic condemnation of the moral character of humankind as it has come to be”), addresses some common misconceptions, considers the shortcomings of Rutger Bregman's “Homo puppy” brand of optimism, and clarifies how – and why – one may wish to be a misanthrope.

IAN JAMES KIDD is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Nottingham. He is interested in intellectual virtue and vice, the nature of a religious life, illness and mortality, misanthropy, and South and East Asian philosophies.

ANTHONY MORGAN has run out of new things to say about himself by this point.

Anthony Morgan (AM): Let's start with a simple question: why misanthropy?

Ian James Kidd (IJK): Misanthropy might not be an easy topic to get into, because the subject is of course intrinsically negative. I define misanthropy as the systematic condemnation of the moral character of humankind as it has come to be. For a misanthrope, humankind as it has come to be is morally atrocious. For all sorts of philosophical and psychological reasons, that's not an attractive thesis for many people. I’m not temperamentally misanthropic myself. My engagement with the subject was through the work of my former Durham colleague, David Cooper. In 2018 he wrote a short book, Animals and Misanthropy, arguing that honest reflection on the exploitation and abuse of animals by humankind justifies a charge of misanthropy. Most people are familiar with misanthropy as a general concept or idea, but it has never been one that philosophers have really taken seriously. Moral philosophers might describe themselves as realists or sentimentalists or contractarians or utilitarians, but rarely as misanthropes.

We begin with those who bear the greatest burdens of our current reality – those who remain violated, exploited, marginalized and powerless – and the systems of oppression – patriarchy, white supremacy, capitalism (to invoke the unholy trinity) – that generate and sustain these burdens.

Gender theorist Paisley Currah argues that prison abolition, the adoption of free universal healthcare, and a large-scale assault on income inequality “would make the most difference to the most trans people”. To riff on Simone de Beauvoir, no oppressed population can be free until all oppressed populations are free. As I write, however, feminists remain divided over the status of trans people, while white working-class Americans continue to accept the psychological “wages of whiteness” rather than unify their interests with those of poor Black Americans.

After a long, overlooked history, the theory of intersectionality finally broke onto the global stage in the late 1980s.

Through emphasizing the intersections between different dimensions of oppression, it opened up the possibility of challenging the idea of a single axis of oppression, showing that all axes of oppression are inextricably linked. But how many axes are there, and how far do they reach not just into human life, but into animal and vegetal life?

In the midst of all this, certain oppressed populations continue to be overlooked. Psychiatric populations, for example, experience some of the most appalling and inhumane treatment imaginable, and yet Mad activism remains a movement that few activists engage with – or even know about. How widely can the reach of human compassion and solidarity be extended?

“In oppression, the oppressor oppresses himself ”. The most dangerous populations are those who are oppressed but fail to recognize their own oppression; reaffirming their identity at the expense of others is their legacy to the world.

To paraphrase Lewis R. Gordon, the biggest enemy of oppression is the realization of its irrelevance; the result is individual oppressors without the structures of oppression. What, then, are the conditions of possibility for the irrelevance of oppression?

What would need to be involved if we want our future robots to be anything more than quiz show champions, phenomenal chess players, and highly efficient killers? An influential answer from many corners of contemporary cognitive science is a body very much like ours, with our needs, desires, pleasures, pains, our kinds of habits, expertise, significance, care, and meaning, our cultural knowledge, practical know-how, and so on. In other words, nothing short of “real meat” embodiment will do. With his characteristic flair and mastery of a great diversity of philosophical traditions, in this conversation Peter Wolfendale clarifies the “real meat” hypothesis and defends the feasibility of isolated human brains animating androids from a distance and distributed artificial intellects inhabiting human bodies from the cloud – without sacrificing any of the cognitive capacities enabled by embodiment.

Peter Wolfendale is an independent philosopher living in the North East of England and the author of Object-Oriented Philosophy: The Noumenon's New Clothes (2019). His influential blog/website is: https://deontologistics.co.

ANTHONY MORGAN is, among other things, the editor of this book.

Anthony Morgan (AM): Please can you start by saying a few things about the rise of embodiment within contemporary philosophy? It seems to me to be mainly used as a corrective against: (1) the Cartesian notion of an immaterial mind, and (2) the materialist tendency to place the mind in the brain. But what are the main positive claims that defenders of embodiment are making?

Peter Wolfendale (PW): I think that the meaning of the term “embodiment” in philosophical circles is deceptively diverse, and that those who champion the concept are motivated by concerns that overlap less than is often appreciated. If they are unified by one thing, it is a rogues’ gallery of common enemies. Although Descartes is the most reviled of these, his errors are often traced back to some original sin perpetrated by Plato. However, in order to make sense of these conceptual crimes, it is worth first distinguishing the explanatory concerns of cognitive science and artificial intelligence from the normative concerns of political and social theory, while acknowledging that both of these are downstream from more general metaphysical concerns regarding the difference and/or relation between matter and mind.

As actress Gal Gadot found out to her cost in assuming that “we’re all in this together” during her preamble to the widely ridiculed celebrity rendition of John Lennon's “Imagine” in the early days of the global pandemic, there is a certain recklessness in harbouring any great ambitions for the first-person plural.

In asking, “What Is We?” in her 2020 essay for The Philosopher, Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan captures the tension that lies at the heart of any assumption of shared subjectivity, perspective, or experience. More conventional forms of that question, such as “who are we?” or “what are we?” take it for granted that “we” already are. Srinivasan, however, is not convinced.

It is a commonplace that universalisms exclude. The pseudouniversalisms that shape the modern world blur the interests of the powerful with the interests of all. The ever-expanding call for rights and recognition from the excluded is at the same time a call to keep the universalist promise. But what if modernity is in fact constituted by its exclusions? Where are we to go from here?

The felt absence of a common world in our time of radical upheaval has led to interpersonal and political deadlock. The twin crises of Covid-19 and anthropogenic climate change have not served to collectivize us; rather, they have served to amplify the staggering differentials of power and advantage that could more easily be papered over in normal times.

Amidst all this, can we cultivate an art of living together, however provisional and unstable? There is no art of polarization, to be sure (just look at Twitter). Rather, the art of living together involves reaching out across ever-expanding categories of difference – human, non-human, vegetal, robotic, earthly. And despite emerging narratives of relationality and interdependence from feminism to physics, nothing feels harder. The cocoon-like embrace of our echo chamber feels terribly attractive when faced with “them” in all their strange, inscrutable otherness.

Polarization is easy, but, to quote Spinoza, “all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare”.

Travis Holloway notes how people “talk casually about the end of the world”. We can distinguish an apocalyptic version of the end of the world from the more modest idea of the end of the world as we know it (or, more modestly still, as we want it). The West certainly finds itself at the end of Fukuyama's end of history, rudely awakened from a complacent belief in the inevitability of a global liberal democratic order. We are in a time of crisis, but still struggle to come up with fruitful ways to think and live our way through it.

“The Anthropocene” has emerged as the most potent western crisis narrative. As Dipesh Chakrabarty (as well as thinkers from many non-western traditions) has noted, we no longer live in a human world shaped by human agency; rather, we have always been geological, we have always been planetary. How long before this idea takes root in the western mind?

Living through crisis promises new forms of collectivity and solidarity: we are all in this together. Holloway considers the Anthropocene narrative to offer “a poetics that collectivizes and politicizes us”. A less optimistic interpretation is that our common Anthropocene inheritance will be little more than increasingly egalitarian exposure to forms of toxicity.

We must be careful when we talk of crises. As Kyle Whyte points out, perceived crises have historically precipitated kneejerk responses that betray ethics and justice. Furthermore, the presumption that the Anthropocene crisis is unprecedented blinds us to the lessons that Indigenous peoples have learned in responding to massive anthropogenic environmental change perpetrated by colonial regimes.

Modernity has been a permanent crisis for various populations, including Indigenous people, Black people in the United States, and non-human creatures. Part of what it means to live through crisis is to realize that some things will never change.

Finding ourselves somewhere between the ideological extremes of techno-optimism and techno-pessimism, we are somewhat ambivalent and just a little confused.

Everyone is still on social media, but it seems that there is an emerging art of living with social media that involves something like: delete all your accounts right now! While social media giants stick by their stated ambition to unify the world, they are in fact, as Brad Evans and Chantal Meza point out, “creating islands of isolation, the likes of which we have never seen before”. Perhaps the art of resistance in the face of ever-more refined and numbing tech seductions is simply (to channel both Bartleby and Žižek) preferring not to?

Tech visionaries have a venerable history of cheque-inthe- mail promises: in the 1960s, Marvin Minsky promised us Hal-style robots “in a generation”; in 2005, Ray Kurzweil declared that “the singularity is near” (Kurzweil sets the date as 2045, which conveniently means he will probably have died shortly before he is proven wrong); prophecies of a forthcoming AI apocalypse get tongues wagging. The reality, however, is far more mundane. Even the LaMDA system that made global headlines last year when a Google engineer claimed it was sentient is, once the stardust settles, just an impressive text production programme. It seems that the art of living with technology is also the art of cultivating a good nose for bullshit.

Iris Murdoch noted that we are creatures who make pictures of ourselves, and then come to resemble that picture.4 Seemingly oblivious to the long history of using the latest technological innovations (from catapults to telephone switchboards) as a model for understanding the mind, the hypothesis driving most modern cognitive science these days is that our minds are literally computers or algorithms. The plausibility of the transhumanist dream of liberation from corporeality and finitude depends on this. But what do we give up and how do we distort our natures when we acquiesce to the powerful, gendered fantasies of a rather bloodless tribal creed?

Despite these misgivings, we all know that it is coming, no matter what …