Not Quite Like Us? — Can Cyborgs and Intelligent Machines Be Natural Persons as a Matter of Law?

Abstract

The ability of AI machines to perform intellectual functions long associated with human higher mental faculties is unprecedented, for it is precisely those functions that have separated humans from all other species. AI machines can now imitate some of the outputs of our form of sapience; they can produce literary and artistic content and even express what seem like feelings and emotions. Calls for “robot rights” are getting louder. Using a transdisciplinary methodology, including philosophy of mind, moral philosophy, linguistics, and neuroscience, this essay aims to situate the difference in law between human and machine in a way that a court of law could operationalize. This is not a purely theoretical exercise. Courts have already started to make that distinction, and making it correctly will likely become gradually more important as humans become more like machines (cyborgs, cobots) and machines more like humans (neural networks, robots with biological material). The essay draws a line that separates human and machine using the way in which humans think, a way that machines may mimic and possibly emulate but are unlikely ever to make their own.