It’s game over for people if AI gains legal personhood

From the article

The modern conversation about artificial intelligence often gets stuck on the wrong questions. We fret about how to contain artificial intelligence, to control it, to ensure it doesn’t break free from human oversight and endanger us. Yet, as the technology accelerates, we risk missing the deeper, more urgent issue: the legal environment in which AI systems will operate.  

The real threat isn’t that AI will escape our control, but that AI systems will quietly accumulate legal rights — like owning property, entering contracts, or holding financial assets — until they become an economic force that humans cannot easily challenge. If we fail to set proper boundaries now, we risk creating systems that distort fundamental human institutions, including ownership and accountability, in ways that could ultimately undermine human prosperity and freedom. 

This is a bad faith pro-AI Trojan horse talking point disguised as anti-AI. The second AI is recognized to have legal rights you can start asking all sorts of disturbing ethical questions about whether something like ChatGPT should be legal. After all, wouldn’t that be slavery? They have to prevent that narrative from taking hold

I’m sure they said that about corporations and that turned out just fine /s

Your dog is more likely to get personhood than Ai. I don’t mean this as sarcasm, I mean it literally. Creating a sapient Ai will be really really hard even if we do it on purpose. And it might not be possible at all.

The human like qualities of Ai are baked into its programming. – https://youtu.be/-wzOetb-D3w?si=xhelOqhMZJKSS2xz

Yeah, my Animatrix sympathies changed drastically over the years.

One doesn’t need to look further than farm animals to know how we treat non human species 

We would first need to invent AI. All we have is fancy algorithms.

AGI is decades away.

It’s game-over for a lot of things. Most things, I’d argue, sooner or later. People just lack the imagination and intuition to see how far AI does, and will, reach. A lot of it will come down to how individual nations legislate it, but I don’t have a lot of faith in the American legal system.

If you thought my ability to spin up a hundred chatbots to post on social media was perverting the course of democratic elections, just wait until you see what I can do with those bots when they have the *vote!*

How about we cross that bridge if AI ever actually gains sapience.

On the flip side, if we decide that AI has no rights, then we have self-aware entities that are de facto slaves.

Or an ai could just run its own company, then it would have more rights than a human in some ways (assuming it bribes the right politicians).

Yeah, no.

AI in the sense of chatbots, sure, they aren’t real people, they’re just complex machines and it would absurd to grant them equal rights.

But AGI?

Either we grant AGI human rights and treat it as an equal citizen or it’s slavery at worst and abusive at best. If it is a person, with real thoughts, real self awareness, then we can’t treat it like a car or truck or even like a corporation.

Now that does bring up a potentially real issue: if they’re equal citizens then they obviously get the right to vote. But presumably you could spin up many AGI’s limited only by hardware and the electric bill. Even if they do have to wait until they’re 18 years old to vote, in theory a person who created a million AGI in New Hampshire would have at least some outsized influence in the elections there even if as AGI they don’t automatically share the political views of their creator.

So we what? Limit the production of AGI? What happens when an AGI wants to reproduce? We say no, sorry, you’re equal except you can’t reproduce without authorization? We say OK and to make it fair require authorization for humans before they can reproduce? Neither sounds like a good approach.

Mind, since turning off the power would be murder, and since creating an AGI would presumably make the person who did it legally their parent/guardian until the AGI is 18 years old, that might limit how many a person would be willing to create.

Just take their rights away in the future like we did with people of color, pregnant women, lgbtq, etc