Bittercon: Can an AI Be a Person

[starshipcat]

Here's an old chestnut that we see revisited on a regular basis, both in the literature and in convention panel discussion

Comments

[whswhs]

I don't see how corporate personhood, or legal personhood more generally, is even relevant to this topic. Personhood in law seems to amount to the capacity to own things and enter into contracts. But treating that as the same as being a person in the ontological sense seems like an equivocation, in the technical sense in which that word is used in logic. It's as if we took Eowyn saying "But no man am I"-meaning that she is a woman-to deny that she is a rational animal, which is a different meaning of the expression "man" that happens to be pronounced the same. (This would not work in Latin, where she would have said non vir sum! rather than non homo sum!-two distinct words rather than two distinct senses of a word