Abstract
What I propose in the present article are some theoretical adjustments for a more coherent answer to the legal “status question” of artificial intelligence (AI) systems. I arrive at those by using the new “bundle theory” of legal personhood, together with its accompanying conceptual and methodological apparatus as a lens through which to look at a recent such answer inspired from German civil law and named Teilrechtsfähigkeit or partial legal capacity. I argue that partial legal capacity is a possible solution to the status question only if we understand legal personhood according to this new theory. Conversely, I argue that if indeed Teilrechtsfähigkeit lends itself to being applied to AI systems, then such flexibility further confirms the bundle theory paradigm shift. I then go on to further analyze and exploit the particularities of Teilrechtsfähigkeit to inform a reflection on the appropriate conceptual shape of legal personhood and suggest a slightly different answer from the bundle theory framework in what I term a “gradient theory” of legal personhood.
Highlights
I argue that partial legal capacity is a possible solution to the status question only if we understand legal personhood according to this new theory
Dubbed “autonomous artificial agents” or AAAs for short (Chopra and White, 2011) or “mathematically formalized information flows” (Teubner, 2018) and based on “artificial intelligence” (AI), to use a “suitcase word”3, AI systems exploit myriad increasingly complex and oftentimes opaque methods found at the intersection of computer science, statistics, and other fields to enable solutions that are adaptive in order to perform specific tasks with a degree of autonomy
For the specific case of AI systems, the bundle theory is used to analyze three contexts that influence the outcome of the debate over their legal status, namely “the ultimate value context”, “the liability context”, and last but not least “the commercial context”
Summary
“Words are events; they do things, change things,” Ursula le Guin, another distinguished writer and one of his devoted admirers, added Nowhere else is this truer perhaps than in law’s empire, where words such as “person” and “thing” are code for a “legal regime.”. In order to apply them, jurists qualify and categorize reality, establishing links between what is and what ought to be The trouble with this attempt at fighting entropy by conceptually ordering reality is that the latter sometimes refuses to play by the rules that we set. This means that new entities in the world do not always fit our existing legal molds, and so we are faced with a conundrum: do we create new molds, or do we tweak and twitch (our understanding of) our entities to fit the old ones?
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