Giving robots 'personhood' is actually about making corporations accountable

The European Union is currently considering the need to redefine the legal status of robots, with a draft report last week suggesting that autonomous bots might, in the future, be granted the status of "electronic persons" -- a legal definition that confers certain "rights and obligations." It sounds like science fiction and that's because it is: any engineer will tell you we're a long way from seeing robot marches for civil rights. For a start, this is only a draft report. It's not actual legislation, and is only a series of recommendations for the EU's law-making body -- they could always ignore it completely. And although parts of the report are a bit odd (Frankenstein's monster, the Greek myth of Pygmalion, and the Golem of Prague are all referenced in the first paragraph alone), at its core it's interested in the rights of people, not the rights of robots.