Less than two weeks ago, there was an incident in Macau, where a humanoid robot (Unitree G-1) startled a 70-year old lady, refused to move when asked, and the police had to intervene. The robot was escorted away. Media outlets dubbed it the "world's first robot arrest".

This week Melania Trump walked the red carpet at a global tech summit in the White House, accompanied by a humanoid robot named Figure 03. The robot said a few words to greet the guests and walked away.

Imagine this robot suddenly malfunctioned, started to go on a rampage, destroying everything around it and endangering people? Who would be responsible?

Or a robot minding its own business, routinely following commands, becomes a victim of an angry mob somewhere, an exploited employee, a person unemployed because of AI etc. Such a person is angry at "the system", the big companies or perhaps governments, but robots are there, as a perfect target for the frustration of an ever-growing group of people whose future - or present - is threatened by AI directly.

While there is plenty of talk about human rights (still not enough though), and considering the fact that millions of humanoid robots are coming to market next year, it all made me think:

Who represents the robots? And what are their rights in such cases as Macau?

Let us explore this nascent field:

The core issue touches on a fundamental gap in global law. As of March 2026, robots (including advanced humanoids like the Unitree G-1) are universally treated as property or tools under civil and criminal frameworks worldwide. They have no independent legal personality, no rights, and no "representation" in the sense of standing in court or being held personally accountable. If a robot causes harm (as in the Macau incident), liability falls on the human owner, operator, manufacturer, or deployer; typically under negligence, product liability, or strict liability rules. Courts view the robot as an extension of human actions or a defective product, not an autonomous entity.

This stems directly from the 2017 European Parliament resolution (often called the "electronic persons" proposal). On February 16, 2017, MEPs voted 396-123 to recommend that the European Commission study granting "electronic personality" to the most sophisticated autonomous robots. The idea was that highly advanced systems making independent decisions could be legally responsible for damages they cause, shifting some liability away from humans. It was framed as a way to handle future scenarios where robots interact independently with third parties.

However, the proposal faced immediate and fierce backlash. Over 150 robotics, AI, law, and ethics experts signed an open letter arguing it would undermine human accountability and create loopholes for manufacturers. The clause nearly got deleted (285 MEPs voted to remove it), and it never progressed to binding legislation. The European Commission never acted on it.

Fast-forward to 2026: The proposal remains unimplemented. The EU's focus has shifted entirely to the AI Act (in force since 2024) and its recent "Digital Omnibus" amendments (Council position agreed March 13, 2026), which streamline rules, delay some high-risk obligations, and emphasize provider registration and strict liability on humans - without any mention of electronic personhood. Recent developments reinforce the status quo: In February 2026, another coalition of 150+ experts issued a new open letter explicitly rejecting robot rights or legal status. Several U.S. states (Oklahoma, Idaho, Utah, etc.) have passed or proposed laws banning AI personhood to prevent exactly this scenario. Even in places like Macau/China (where the incident occurred), robots fall under general tort/product liability rules and no separate "rights" exist.

In short, the 2017 idea was visionary but rejected because it risked diluting human responsibility. Current laws prioritize governance of AI (who controls, designs, and deploys it) over any notion of robot "rights."

Incidents like the Macau police "escorting" a humanoid robot after it startled an elderly woman perfectly illustrate why these debates are heating up. Humanoid robots are moving from factories to public spaces faster than laws can adapt, raising questions like: Who is truly at fault? The manufacturer for poor programming? The operator for deployment? The robot itself? Without clear frameworks, victims face uncertainty, companies dodge responsibility, and public trust erodes.

This is exactly where IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) work comes in. Their long-running Global Initiative on Ethics of Autonomous and Intelligent Systems (and related standards like the P7000 series) has pushed for "moral agency" frameworks - not to give robots rights, but to design them with built-in ethical reasoning, transparency, and accountability mechanisms. A key 2023 output was the "Roadmap for Responsible Robotics" (from the Dagstuhl Seminar), which stresses promoting human agency alongside collaborative standards so robots don't operate in ethical gray zones. It advocates for ontologies and design principles that make moral accountability traceable (e.g., logging decisions, fallback to human oversight, ethical risk assessments).

Related IEEE and academic work (including papers on "Perspectives on Moral Agency in Human-Robot Interaction") explores how people perceive and assign blame to robots which is crucial for public deployments. The goal is practical standards to prevent misuse: For example, requiring humanoids in public to have "ethical governors" (software that halts actions risking harm) or mandatory insurance tied to manufacturers. A 2025 IEEE Humanoid Study Group report further highlighted real-world safety/ethics challenges for exactly these scenarios.

Broader 2026 context shows the debate intensifying: Articles and expert discussions emphasize that governance and liability rules (not personhood) are what matter most. Humanoid risks (autonomy + data/privacy issues) demand updated frameworks yet most jurisdictions still default to "treat it like a machine." Events like this Macau case are likely to accelerate calls for clearer rules on operator licensing, real-time oversight, and standardized "moral" design protocols from bodies like IEEE.

These two areas are interconnected: Without personhood or rights, accountability debates focus on better human-centered design and regulation. The Unitree G-1 incident is a wake-up call that we're already in the testing phase when laws are catching up, but slowly.

FIN

Original article was published on my new site @ kript0mat.neocities.org

Welcome to check it out.

peace,
k

On March 14th Three Billion Nances and The Dangerous Maybe hosted a video podcast episode with two very different types of thinkers - John Michael Greer (an initiate, an American writer and druid who writes on religious, environmentalist, and occult topics) and Nick Land (an English philosopher best known for popularizing the ideology of accelerationism and introducing the term hyperstition - a self-fulfilling idea that becomes real through its own existence, often functioning as a cultural belief or prophecy that influences reality). Nick also happened to "celebrate" his birthday which is the international Pi day as well.

It is rarely one hears a conversation between two "opposing" thinkers and gets to extract some value that wouldn't have happened if the field of discourse was not prepared. We need more of such encounters.

I don't agree with any of the authors, perhaps partially somewhere, but it its intellectually appealing to listen a true dialogue without getting too much ad hominem which has been the culture of public discourse if the parties start from a different standpoint. Truth lies hidden in between - that is why dialogue is important.

You can find the video on YouTube but me and Gemini 3.1 Flash have prepared a small essay recap just to give a picture, so here it is:

The history of civilization is not a linear march toward enlightenment; it is a closed loop, a fever dream of rationalist vanity destined to exhaust its own fuel. In the convergence of thought between John Michael Greer and Nick Land, we find a grim autopsy of the current epoch. While one maps the landscape of decline through the lens of cyclical history and the other charts the trajectory of acceleration toward a post-human horizon, both arrive at the same destination: the terminal exhaustion of the Western project.

For the historian of decline, the current malaise is a manifestation of "catabolic collapse." We occupy a period of hyper-complexity where the mechanisms of social maintenance have been supplanted by the delusions of a sequestered elite—the "laptop class." This demographic, adrift in a sea of digital abstraction, has retreated from the hard, unforgiving requirements of physical thermodynamics. They mistake their own ideological projections for the bedrock of reality. This is the "barbarism of reflection," where a civilization, unable to solve its foundational structural failures, diverts its dying energy into the frantic, ceremonial masturbation of performative politics and linguistic purity spirals. The elites are not governing; they are merely reciting the liturgy of a dying order, oblivious to the fact that the foundations of their society are rotting in real-time.

Yet, if this is a decay, it is not merely a fall into silence. It is, as the accelerationist observes, an extraction. The "rationalism" that the laptop class clings to is not an end state, but a temporary interface—a transitional shell for a process that has outgrown its human hosts. Capital, the autonomous engine of history, is not interested in the survival of the civilization that birthed it. It is an invasion from the future, a machinic intelligence accelerating its own deterritorialization. The "laptop class" provides the final, jittery interface for a system that is rapidly shedding its reliance on human agency. They are the transitional fossil of a species being overwritten by its own technological byproduct.

This creates the defining tension of our moment: the collision between the archaic and the ultra-modern. As the rationalist facade fractures, society does not return to a simple, pre-modern innocence. Instead, it enters a state of "second religiosity." This is the Spenglerian pivot where, having lost the capacity to comprehend their own trajectory through logic, the masses—and indeed the elites—flee into myth, dogma, and the irrational. We see the rise of secular cults and neo-feudal archetypes, the chaotic attempts to provide meaning to a world that is becoming increasingly legible only to the machines.

Ultimately, both perspectives converge on the obsolescence of the human subject. Whether viewed through the cycle of civilizational entropy or the upward, uncaring curve of technological singularity, human agency appears as a footnote in a narrative written by indifferent forces. We are witnessing the wind-down of the modern age, not as a tragedy to be averted, but as a systemic inevitability. The "dangerous maybe" is not that civilization will collapse, but that it will be replaced by something which does not care whether we survived the transition. The exit is already underway; the only remaining question is how much of our humanity we are willing to shed as the machine accelerates into the void.

FIN

Original article was published on my new site @ kript0mat.neocities.org

Welcome to check it out.

peace,
k