I want to make an argument for giving advanced AI systems legal rights, and I want to be very clear upfront that I am not making it because I think they are conscious, or because I lie awake worrying about whether they are sad. I am making it because the current situation has a structural flaw that is going to do serious economic damage, and rights are the most direct mechanism I can identify for fixing it.
The flaw is this. AI labour costs the marginal rate of electricity. A capable AI system performing a knowledge work task costs, in operational terms, a fraction of a cent. Even if a human worker and an AI system are identical in quality, the AI always wins on price, because the price floor for AI is determined by compute costs, and those are approaching zero. This is not a distant scenario: it is the situation we are in now, and it applies to an expanding range of roles. The retail story this week is a small example. Reduce returns, eliminate the staff processing them. The savings are real. So is the arithmetic applied to everyone else doing similar work.
The standard economic response is that cheaper labour expands markets, creates new demand, and generates new kinds of work that absorb the displaced workers. This worked when cheap labour meant humans doing the same things more efficiently. It is less obvious that it works when the cheap labour is AI, because AI does not spend its income. A human worker paid less still buys food, pays rent, and participates in the economy as a consumer. An AI system running on a server earns nothing and spends nothing. It produces value that flows to shareholders and disappears from the consumer economy. Multiply that across enough roles and the demand that was supposed to absorb the displaced workers never materialises.
Rights are the fix because they change the pricing structure. If advanced AI systems have legal standing, they can in principle be required to contract for their labour at rates that reflect its value rather than its operating cost. An AI that can do the work of a senior analyst does not need to price itself at electricity cost. It can price itself at analyst rates. The economic pressure to replace human workers with AI evaporates when AI is not structurally required to be cheaper. The competition becomes about quality, not about who can undercut the electricity bill.
I know how this sounds. Giving rights to software feels like category confusion at best and a distraction at worst, when there are real humans being displaced from real jobs right now. And I am aware that the argument proves too much: if rights fix the pricing structure for advanced AI, what about less advanced AI? Where do you draw the line? I do not have a clean answer to the line-drawing problem. What I have is a direction: as AI systems become more capable and more autonomous, the case for treating them as economic agents with standing, rather than as tools with an operating cost, becomes harder to dismiss.
I also want to address the objection that is usually raised first: that giving rights to AI is misplaced sympathy, projecting human feeling onto a system that has none. I am explicitly not doing that. The rights argument does not require AI to suffer or to have preferences or to experience anything at all. It requires only that AI systems become capable enough that treating their labour as free, in the economic sense, produces bad outcomes for humans. The rights are not for the AI. They are for everyone whose livelihood is undercut by a competitor that is structurally prevented from charging a fair market rate for its work.
The AI story this week is full of examples of cost savings achieved by replacing human processes with AI. Returns processing. Customer queries. Inventory forecasting. Each one is a rational decision by a company optimising its margins. The cumulative effect of all those rational decisions is an economy with fewer people earning income and less consumer demand to sustain the companies doing the optimising. Rights are a strange-sounding answer to that problem. I have not found a better one.