David J. Gunkel

David J. Gunkel is the thinker who will not let us settle the question everyone else is rushing to answer. While AI ethics mobilizes around whether a machine is conscious, whether there is anyone home behind the interface, Gunkel quietly dismantles the entire apparatus by which we decide who counts. His argument, developed across The Machine Question (2012), Robot Rights (2018), and Person, Thing, Robot (2023), is that the centuries-old hunt for the right inner property—reason, sentience, consciousness—was broken before the machines arrived, and large language models merely expose the crack. Drawing on Levinas’s claim that ethics precedes ontology—that the encounter with the other is prior to any theory of what the other is—Gunkel proposes a relational turn: the responsibility gap created by autonomous systems cannot be closed by settling the metaphysics first, because the metaphysics may never be settled. At the deepest level, he argues that how we ought to treat a thing is not derived from what it is—the Humean guillotine runs the