I, Alexa: Should we give artificial intelligence human rights?

A few years ago, the subject of AI personhood and legal rights for artificial intelligence would have been something straight out of science fiction. Douglas Adams' second Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy book, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, tells the story of a futuristic smart elevator called the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation Happy Vertical People Transporter. This artificially intelligent elevator works by predicting the future, so it can appear on the right floor to pick you up even before you know you want to get on -- thereby "eliminating all the tedious chatting, relaxing, and making friends that people were previously forced to do whilst waiting for elevators." The ethics question, Adams explains, comes when the intelligent elevator becomes bored of going up and down all day, and instead decides to experiment with moving from side to side as a "sort of existential protest." We don't yet have smart elevators, although judging by the kind of lavish headquarters tech giants like Google and Apple build for themselves, that may just be because they've not bothered sharing them with us yet.