From Slaves to Synths? Superintelligence and the Evolution of Legal Personality

TL;DR

This paper explores how the concept of legal personality might evolve with the rise of superintelligent AI, potentially reshaping law's understanding of agency, responsibility, and moral sovereignty.

Contribution

It analyzes current legal frameworks and discusses how superintelligence could prompt a fundamental shift in legal personality and agency concepts.

Findings

Existing legal frameworks can address short-term accountability for AI.

Superintelligence may require a paradigmatic shift in legal theory.

Legal personality might depend on moral sovereignty rather than machine cognition.

Abstract

This essay examines the evolving concept of legal personality through the lens of recent developments in artificial intelligence and the possible emergence of superintelligence. Legal systems have long been open to extending personhood to non-human entities, most prominently corporations, for instrumental or inherent reasons. Instrumental rationales emphasize accountability and administrative efficiency, whereas inherent ones appeal to moral worth and autonomy. Neither is yet sufficient to justify conferring personhood on AI. Nevertheless, the acceleration of technological autonomy may lead us to reconsider how law conceptualizes agency and responsibility. Drawing on comparative jurisprudence, corporate theory, and the emerging literature on AI governance, the paper argues that existing frameworks can address short-term accountability gaps, but the eventual development of superintelligence may force a paradigmatic shift in our understanding of law itself. In such a speculative future, legal personality may depend less on the cognitive sophistication of machines than on humanity's ability to preserve our own moral and institutional sovereignty.