ABSTRACT
The recent development of advanced computers capable of performing some tasks at the same level as (or sometimes, even better than) their human makers has opened up a whole series of questions. Even before the advent of the computer age, filmmakers, and, before them, novelists, have seen fiction as a suitable means for exploring these questions. Thus, Mary Shelley’s nineteenth-century novel Frankenstein, while it deals with an organic “monster” rather than one made of silicon chips and metal, shares much in common with later novels and movies about advanced robots and their relationship with their human makers. A recent contribution to this long line of fictional works, the film I, Robot, explores many of the questions at the intersection of philosophy and artificial intelligence. Could a highly advanced robot be a person (in the sense of having various moral rights, such as the right not to be harmed without just cause)? What does it mean to be a person, anyway? Is having a mind a prerequisite for personhood? Is it possible for somethingmade of silicon, wire, and metal to have a mind?
