A Pragmatic View of AI Personhood

TL;DR

This paper proposes a pragmatic, flexible framework for AI personhood, viewing it as a bundle of societal obligations rather than a metaphysical property, enabling practical governance and accountability solutions for AI agents.

Contribution

It introduces a novel pragmatic approach to AI personhood, unbundling traditional concepts to create context-specific solutions for AI governance and accountability.

Findings

Unbundling personhood allows tailored AI governance solutions.

Digital identity tech can facilitate AI accountability.

Rejecting essentialism enables pragmatic AI integration.

Abstract

The emergence of agentic Artificial Intelligence (AI) is set to trigger a "Cambrian explosion" of new kinds of personhood. This paper proposes a pragmatic framework for navigating this diversification by treating personhood not as a metaphysical property to be discovered, but as a flexible bundle of obligations (rights and responsibilities) that societies confer upon entities for a variety of reasons, especially to solve concrete governance problems. We argue that this traditional bundle can be unbundled, creating bespoke solutions for different contexts. This will allow for the creation of practical tools -- such as facilitating AI contracting by creating a target "individual" that can be sanctioned -- without needing to resolve intractable debates about an AI's consciousness or rationality. We explore how individuals fit in to social roles and discuss the use of decentralized digital identity technology, examining both "personhood as a problem", where design choices can create "dark patterns" that exploit human social heuristics, and "personhood as a solution", where conferring a bundle of obligations is necessary to ensure accountability or prevent conflict. By rejecting foundationalist quests for a single, essential definition of personhood, this paper offers a more pragmatic and flexible way to think about integrating AI agents into our society.