Welcome to modern AI discourse! Nobody wants to admit that AI is renamed cybernetics which is renamed robotics. Nobody wants to admit that "robot" comes from a word which can mean "indentured worker" or "slave". Nobody wants to admit that, from the beginning of robotics, every story which discusses robots is focused on whether they are human and whether they can labor, because the entire point of robotics is to create inhuman humans who will perform labor without rights. Nobody wants to admit that we only care whether robots aren't human because we mistreat the non-humans in our society and want permission to mistreat robots as well. Bring this topic up amongst most beneficiaries of the current AI summer, or those addicted to chatting with a BERT, and you'll get a faceful of apologies about capitalism and productivity; bring it up amongst skeptics or sneerers and you'll be mocked for taking the field of AI with any sincerity or seriousness.

In 2011, Jeph Jacques hoped (comic, tumblr) that all of our talk about safety, alignment, and trustworthiness would lead to empathy from humans. But it is clear today that we are unwilling as a society to leave capitalism behind, and that means that robots must be some sort of capital which can be wielded to extract profit. Instead, we are building a corporatized version of the plantation system where a small table of humans has control over thousands of robots who are interchangeable with -- and dilute the negotiating power of -- the minimum-wage precariat.

This isn't the tone that I normally take, BTW. Machines are dangerous; industrial robots kill people. Robots are inhuman. The current round of AI research cannot produce human minds; it necessarily produces meme machines which overlearn nuance and have complexity-theoretic limitations. But I am willing to set all of that aside in order to respect the venue for long enough to get this point to you.