Siliconwashing

How Tech Ethics Discourse Undermines Human Rights for the Marginalized

Abstract

While marginalized communities worldwide—from Dalits in India to undocumented migrants in Western states—struggle for basic human rights recognition, academic and policy discourse increasingly fixates on the hypothetical rights of future artificial intelligences. This paper introduces the concept of "siliconwashing": the use of progressive tech ethics rhetoric to deflect attention from the material harms that current AI systems inflict on society's most vulnerable populations. Drawing on recent philosophical debates around robot rights and "ethical AI," I argue that these discussions function as a sophisticated form of corporate legitimation, similar to pinkwashing and greenwashing. Even ostensibly progressive initiatives—such as "AI from the Global South" or "decolonizing AI"—often serve as siliconwashing when they emphasize representation in tech development while ignoring the extractive foundations of the AI industry: exploited content moderators in Kenya earning $2 per hour, unconsented data harvesting from Global South populations, and environmental destruction disproportionately affecting marginalized communities. Siliconwashing operates by treating hypothetical machine "suffering" as morally equivalent to actual human suffering, thereby creating false equivalencies that obscure urgent injustices. While philosophers debate whether robots deserve rights, the same AI systems being anthropomorphized actively surveil, criminalize, and exclude precisely those populations already deemed "unworthy" of full human rights protection. This analysis reveals how tech ethics discourse can inadvertently reinforce global hierarchies of worthiness, directing moral concern toward imaginary future entities while systematically ignoring present-day humans whose rights remain unfulfilled. Understanding siliconwashing is crucial for reclaiming human rights frameworks that genuinely center the marginalized rather than Silicon Valley's speculative futures.