The Persona of AI

The Line: AI & the Future Of Personhood is a recent book from Scottish legal scholar James Boyle, one of the founders of the non-profit organization Creative Commons. In a world increasingly crowded with books about AI, Boyle’s stands out as being interested less in the technological questions around AI, or the effect of AI on politics or society, than in how we think about the technology and by extension how we think about personhood.

A true artificial intelligence will challenge our definition of “person,” and, as Boyle points out, it’s only one such challenge we can see coming in the near future. What of an animal with human genes designed to have near-human intelligence? Boyle’s argument, and it’s hard to disagree, is that it’s worth thinking now about how we draw the line between what sorts of entities are “people” and what sorts are not.

His book looks at what kinds of new people may be coming in the not-too-distant future, and at ways that philosophers and the American legal system have considered the concept of personhood in the past. We can’t know exactly what yet-to-be-developed technologies will look like, so the point is less to come up with firm definitions about personhood than to work out how to think about the concept.

The book, available freely online under a Creative Commons license, starts with an introduction laying out its structure and presenting two thought-experiments, one about a computer AI and one about a genetically-modified chimp. These experiments are developed through the rest of the book: a brief chapter about empathy and how it affects our ability to perceive others as people; then the longest chapter, specifically about AI; then chapters on corporations, non-human animals, and genetically-modified or hybrid animals, before everything’s wrapped up in a conclusion suggesting some ways to work out who and what counts as a person.

Boyle provides his perspective at the end, but doesn’t present it as the sole solution to the problems he raises. It’s one solution; so his thinking, as we’ve followed it through the book, becomes an example of the kind of thinking that may be required of all of us. His writing’s clear enough that it’s never difficult to follow his logic. He avoids the excesses of academic prose while knowledgeably citing and discussing court cases and philosophy alike.

There’s also some consideration of science fiction, particularly in the early chapter on empathy. Given Boyle’s approach, this makes sense; one way to look at science fiction is as a series of thought experiments, if experiments worked through in a particularly dramatic vein. Boyle could’ve usefully leaned more into science fiction, and maybe especially recent science fiction—the genre’s clearly directly relevant to his interest here.

But after the first chapter, most of the discussions of personhood Boyle refers to are philosophical articles and court cases. Boyle chooses to limit himself to American legal cases, arguing that he wants his book to be specifically about how American society will approach new questions of personhood for new kinds of people. I’m not convinced.

In an interrelated world, how other societies think about AI and other future persons will come to affect how America does. I specifically suspect his chapter on non-human animals might’ve benefitted from looking at the experience of other places—a Buenos Aires court bestowed personhood on a great ape, for example, and last year a treaty between New Zealand and other island nations in the Pacific gave whales and dolphins the status of legal persons. I’d also have liked to have seen at least a passing mention to the laws in various countries that give personhood to river systems.

It would fit in with the rest of Boyle’s book. He observes in his chapter on corporations that in legal terms “person” means effectively “an entity that can be sued”—and an entity with rights that the legal system’s bound to recognize. Boyle gives a lot of space to the legal tradition that bestows personhood on entities such as corporations, looking at how that works and how it’s affected later thought on the definition of “person.” There’s logic to that, in that it’s a practical real-world example of the importance of the question he’s interested in.

But it also points up a gap in the book. This a book about how humans think about personhood, and how humans define it, and who gets the benefit of empathy and of being described as a “person.” The question, then, of how to think about the possible personhood of nonhuman entities should be informed by the history of how and why actual human beings were not recognized as people.

There are relatively brief mentions of slavery and colonialism. But the book should’ve engaged more deeply with the history of these things. To talk about the way in which society will consider anything, perhaps especially personhood, means engaging with how that thinking will be shaped by society’s self-interest and the interests of the rich and powerful within society. Boyle’s book chooses not to explore the realpolitik aspect of the debates to come.

In some ways, that’s an admirable choice. It keeps the book focused on the actual issues, and on good-faith arguments about who’s a person and what’s not. As a book about ways of thought, The Line is valuable, intelligent, readable, and potentially useful. It’s good enough that I would’ve liked to have seen more things in it. But I’m afraid it also may be good enough that its honorable execution will limit its relevance in the debates the future will see about persons we can’t now imagine.