Abstract
The paper examines today’s debate on the legal status of AI robots, and how often scholars and policy makers confuse the legal agenthood of these artificial agents with the status of legal personhood. By taking into account current trends in the field, the paper suggests a twofold stance. First, policy makers shall seriously mull over the possibility of establishing novel forms of accountability and liability for the activities of AI robots in contracts and business law, e.g., new forms of legal agenthood in cases of complex distributed responsibility. Second, any hypothesis of granting AI robots full legal personhood has to be discarded in the foreseeable future. However, how should we deal with Sophia, which became the first AI application to receive citizenship of any country, namely, Saudi Arabia, in October 2017? Admittedly, granting someone, or something, legal personhood is—as always has been—a highly sensitive political issue that does not simply hinge on rational choices and empirical evidence. Discretion, arbitrariness, and even bizarre decisions play a role in this context. However, the normative reasons why legal systems grant human and artificial entities, such as corporations, their status, help us taking sides in today’s quest for the legal personhood of AI robots. Is citizen Sophia really conscious, or capable of suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous scholars?
Highlights
The legal personhood of robots has been a popular topic of today’s debate on the normative challenges brought about by this technology
There, I suggested a threefold level of abstraction, so as to properly address today’s debate on the legal personhood of robots and smart artificial intelligence (AI) systems, that is: (i)
At the risk of being lambasted for reactionary anthropocentrism, the conclusion of the paper is that such a quest for the legal personhood of AI robots should not have priority over the regulation of more urgent issues triggered by the extraordinary developments in this field
Summary
The legal personhood of robots has been a popular topic of today’s debate on the normative challenges brought about by this technology. National legislation may include data and information in the notion of product, it remains far from clear whether the adaptive and dynamic nature of AI through either machine learning techniques, or updates, or revisions, may entail or create a defect in the “product”). Against this framework, the aim of the paper is to shed further light on such threefold status that. Have regulated the behaviour of AI robots as simple tools of human interaction and as a source of responsibility for other agents in the system [4], have advancements of technology affected this traditional framework? At the risk of being lambasted for reactionary anthropocentrism, the conclusion of the paper is that such a quest for the legal personhood of AI robots should not have priority over the regulation of more urgent issues triggered by the extraordinary developments in this field
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