How AI will challenge our ideas about personhood.
Chatbots like ChatGPT have challenged human exceptionalism: we are no longer the only beings capable of generating language and ideas fluently. But is ChatGPT conscious? Or is it merely engaging in sophisticated mimicry? And what happens in the future if the claims to consciousness are more credible? In The Line, James Boyle explores what these changes might do to our concept of personhood, to “the line” we believe separates our species from the rest of the world but that also separates “persons” with legal rights from objects.
The personhood wars—over the rights of corporations and animals, over the question of when life begins and ends—have always been contentious. We've even denied the personhood of members of our own species. How will those old fights affect the new ones, and vice versa? Boyle pursues these questions across a dizzying array of fields. He discusses moral philosophy and science fiction, transgenic species, nonhuman animals, the surprising history of corporate personality, and AI itself. Engaging with empathy and anthropomorphism, courtroom battles on behalf of chimps, and doom-laden projections about the threat of AI, The Line offers fascinating and thoughtful answers to questions about our future that will arrive sooner than we think.
Conditions of Use
This book is licensed under a Creative Commons License (CC BY-NC-SA). You can download the ebook The Line for free.
- Title
- The Line
- Subtitle
- AI and the Future of Personhood
- Publisher
- The MIT Press
- Author(s)
- James Boyle
- Published
- 2024-10-22
- Edition
- 1
- Format
- eBook (pdf, epub, mobi)
- Pages
- 336
- Language
- English
- ISBN-10
- 0262049163
- ISBN-13
- 9780262379670
- License
- CC BY-NC-SA
- Book Homepage
- Free eBook, Errata, Code, Solutions, etc.
Contents Introduction Hal Chimpy® Reality or Science Fiction? 1: Slaves, Skin-Jobs, and Artificial Sheep Empathy and Anthropomorphism The Moral Sentiments? A Voight-Kampff Test for Humans? Priming: The Moral Stroboscope 2: Artificial Intelligence The Butlerian Challenge Hubris and Humility in AI Artificial Intelligence? When? It’s All about the Hardware(?) Even If It Works, Is It Conscious? Superiority Complex? The Future(s) of Personhood The Turing Test in a Chatbot Era Sock-Puppet, Custom-Designed, and “Unruly” AI Personhood Summing Up 3: Corporations What Is a Corporate Person? Corporations in the Courts Corporate Conspiracy or Constitutional Confluence? 4: Nonhuman Animals The Qualities-of-Mind Argument The Legal Rightsholder Argument 5: Transgenic Entities, Chimeras, and Hybrids The View from Ethical Scholarship The Moral Significance of Species Boundaries Capacity Starts from Species Justifying Species-Based Distinctions? Morally Irrelevant Facts Lessons Learned? Conclusion Our Interlocking Personhood Debates The End Games Acknowledgments Notes Introduction Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter Conclusion Index