Robots - Who or Which?

To humanize or not to humanize robots?

As you might or might not know, I have been teaching English for almost two years now. Since all of my students study English as second-language-speakers, they often have interesting insights upon the English language.

Yesterday, one of my students posed an interesting query. She was trying to talk about robots and AI, and this is what she said.

“Robots and AI, who are… sorry, which are… I don’t know what to use.”

While usually this would be a simple grammar error to correct, this particular question baffled me.

When do we use who and when do we use which?

We use ‘who’ with people, often to refer back to a known subject. In simple words if I want to convey two pieces of information about the subject (or ‘doer’) Ram, we can use two different sentences. Ram is a good boy. Ram/he performed well in his class.

If we want to condense this sentence, we can use ‘who’ to refer back to Ram. Ram, who is a good boy, performed well in his class.

Similarly, we use which with animals and objects. The dog is smart. The dog fell down from the wall. This can be condensed - to The dog, which is smart, fell down from the wall.

With objects, it works in a similar fashion. The box is big. Please open the box. This can be condensed to - Please open the box which is big.

Back to the robot problem

To answer whether we should be using ‘who’ or ‘which’ with robot goes back to the question of whether a robot is a thing/animal or a person.

Perhaps, for now robots can be referred to using ‘which’, but who knows when that ‘which’ can turn into a ‘who’. That’s what I told my student. And she responded with a nervous laugh.