Of, for, and by the people: the legal lacuna of synthetic persons
By Joanna J. Bryson, Mihailis E. Diamantis, T. Grant. 2017
286 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Conferring legal personhood on purely synthetic entities is a very real legal possibility, one under consideration presently by the European Union. We show here that such legislative action would be morally unnecessary and legally troublesome. While AI legal personhood may have some emotional or economic appeal, so do many superficially desirable hazards against which the law protects us. We review the utility and history of legal fictions of personhood, discussing salient precedents where such fictions resulted in abuse or incoherence. We conclude that difficulties in holding “electronic persons” accountable when they violate the rights of others outweigh the highly precarious moral interests that AI legal personhood might protect.
Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Safety Research
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Cognitive Neuroscience
- Vincent C. Müller
- Ben Hutchinson
- Timnit Gebru
- Giulio Mecacci
- Margaret Mitchell
- Inioluwa Deborah Raji
- Filippo Santoni de Sio
In Safety Research
- Ben Hutchinson
- Inioluwa Deborah Raji
- Margaret Mitchell
- Timnit Gebru
- Andrew Smart
- Vincent C. Müller
- Jamila Smith-Loud
- Daniel Theron
Citations in the corpus
- Closing the AI accountability gap: defining an end-to-end framework for internal algorithmic auditing (2020, background): “Although algorithms themselves cannot be held accountable as they are not moral or legal agents [7], the organizations designing and deploying algorithms can through governance structures.”
- Four Responsibility Gaps with Artificial Intelligence: Why they Matter and How to Address them (2021, background): “…by AI systems discussed by Schellekens (2018) and the introduction of electronic personhood proposed among others by the European Parliament resolution on Civil Law Rules on Robotics (Delvaux, 2017) and discussed among others by Koops et al. (2010) and, in a critical fashion, Bryson et al. (2017).”
- Ethics of artificial intelligence and robotics (2020, background): “It has been said that “such legislative action would be morally unnecessary and legally troublesome” because it would not serve the interest of humans (Bryson, Diamantis, and Grant 2017, 273).”