Abstract
This paper proposes to address the question of the legal status of artificial intelligence (AI) from a perspective that is unique to itself. Which means that, rather than attempting to place AI in the box of legal personhood—where many other nonhuman entities already reside, in a legal space where they are in a state of constant friction with humans—we will see whether these inhabitants can be placed in a different box: not that of legal personhood, but that of the intelligent machine. I accordingly argue that we have made a mistake in not clearly maintaining the original separation between legal persons and human persons: this is how legal persons—particularly as the concept applies to corporations—have so far been claiming and gaining the rights ascribed to humans, on the basis of their personhood. AI instead suggests the need to work outside the framework of this fiction: it suggests that we should stop using the fiction of the person for something that is not a person in the first place and in the most original and primary sense of this word. I propose a different metaphor, the metaphor of the intelligent machine, to this end drawing on the work of Dan-Cohen (2016), who advanced this metaphor to argue that it fits corporations better than the metaphor of the person. In conclusion, we should be able to see that this metaphor of the intelligent machine makes a better fit not only for corporations but also for AI and robotics.
Published Version
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