Bittercon: Can an AI Be a Person
Here's an old chestnut that we see revisited on a regular basis, both in the literature and in convention panel discussion.
Some people have firm opinions, of the sort that are not apt to be shifted by developments in technology. In particular, some may have strong religious objections to the concept of machine personhood, but there can be other types of objections, including philosophical and aesthetic, that are unlikely to be altered by rational discussion.
But for those who are open to the possibility of AI personhood, it often comes down to what exactly we mean by it. There seem to be a number of critical areas, particularly legal and moral, but also spiritual and philosophical aspects.
With corporate personhood, we already have legal entities that are regarded as persons under the law, but are not biological human beings. Alexis Gilliland used corporate personhood as a way for AI's to gain legal personhood in his Rosainate trilogy. However, the broadening of legal personhood could actually end up weakening legal personhood for actual human beings -- as we see in some of the stories set in the later eras of Larry Niven's Known Space 'verse, where we see a Legal Entity system replace personhood and citizenship in a multi-species society, but with some odd results, including children being not considered Legal Entities, and thus being little more than animate chattels -- which can be a very dangerous position to be when a hungry or bored Kzin is around (especially in a society in which puberty can be delayed indefinitely because parents want to keep enjoying having children, not teens, but adulthood is based upon physical maturation rather than chronological age).
Both law and morality define our obligations to other persons -- but in different ways. So we could have situations where an entity is not regarded as legally a person, but most people would have an intuitive sense of moral personhood that must be respected. For instance, we see some of this in the early chapters of Robert J Sawyer's Hominids, after Ponter is recognized as a Neanderthal, but his legal status is still ambiguous. Similarly, we could find situations where a machine intelligence is still in a legal gray area, but many people feel that yes, this is a person who is deserving of the same respect and courtesies as a biological human being.
However, with machine entities we would have one major issue that we would be less likely to have to consider with non-human biological entities: namely, are we dealing with a genuinely conscious entity, or with a very sophisticated simulation?
Some people have firm opinions, of the sort that are not apt to be shifted by developments in technology. In particular, some may have strong religious objections to the concept of machine personhood, but there can be other types of objections, including philosophical and aesthetic, that are unlikely to be altered by rational discussion.
But for those who are open to the possibility of AI personhood, it often comes down to what exactly we mean by it. There seem to be a number of critical areas, particularly legal and moral, but also spiritual and philosophical aspects.
With corporate personhood, we already have legal entities that are regarded as persons under the law, but are not biological human beings. Alexis Gilliland used corporate personhood as a way for AI's to gain legal personhood in his Rosainate trilogy. However, the broadening of legal personhood could actually end up weakening legal personhood for actual human beings -- as we see in some of the stories set in the later eras of Larry Niven's Known Space 'verse, where we see a Legal Entity system replace personhood and citizenship in a multi-species society, but with some odd results, including children being not considered Legal Entities, and thus being little more than animate chattels -- which can be a very dangerous position to be when a hungry or bored Kzin is around (especially in a society in which puberty can be delayed indefinitely because parents want to keep enjoying having children, not teens, but adulthood is based upon physical maturation rather than chronological age).
Both law and morality define our obligations to other persons -- but in different ways. So we could have situations where an entity is not regarded as legally a person, but most people would have an intuitive sense of moral personhood that must be respected. For instance, we see some of this in the early chapters of Robert J Sawyer's Hominids, after Ponter is recognized as a Neanderthal, but his legal status is still ambiguous. Similarly, we could find situations where a machine intelligence is still in a legal gray area, but many people feel that yes, this is a person who is deserving of the same respect and courtesies as a biological human being.
However, with machine entities we would have one major issue that we would be less likely to have to consider with non-human biological entities: namely, are we dealing with a genuinely conscious entity, or with a very sophisticated simulation?