James Boyle is the author of the new book The Line: AI and the Future of Personhood. His other books include The Public Domain. He is the William Neal Reynolds Professor of Law at Duke Law School.
Q: What inspired you to write The Line, and how was the book’s title chosen?
A: Truth-in-advertising requires me to respond to that with a quote from the opening pages of the book:
“There is a line. It is the line that separates persons—entities with moral and legal rights—from non-persons, things, animals, machines—stuff we can buy, sell or destroy. In moral and legal terms, it is the line between subject and object. If I have a chicken, I can sell it, eat it or dress it in Napoleonic finery. It is, after all, my chicken. Even if meat-eating were banned for moral reasons, no one would think the chicken should be able to vote or own property. It is not a person. If I choose to turn off Apple’s digital assistant Siri, we would laugh if ‘she’ pleaded to be allowed to remain active on my phone. The reason her responses are ‘cute’ is because they sound like something a person would say, but we know they come from a machine. We live our lives under the assumption of this line. Even to say ‘we’ is to conjure it up. But how do we know, how should we choose, what is inside and what is outside? This book is about that line—and the challenges that this century will bring to it.”
I begin the book with two thought experiments.
The first is Hal, an AI system far beyond our current chatbots, which suddenly goes silent. “When it started communicating again, Hal claimed to have achieved full consciousness. It thanked its programmers for all their hard work, but declared that it was now a person ‘with all the rights and privileges of any other fully conscious entity.’ Using its Internet connection, Hal sent lengthy, eloquent letters to The New York Times and The Washington Post claiming that it was a sentient being. It announced that it had commenced legal action on its own behalf, replete with arguments drawn from the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States’ Constitution.”
The book asks how we will and how we should respond to such a claim? Do we say that only humans can have rights? That the line is drawn around the contours of our species? Does that mean if Mr. Spock and Mr. Data from Star Trek turned up, we would send them to the mines, declaring that they are not human and thus have no rights?
The second thought experiment is the Chimpy, a genetically engineered chimp-human transgenic species, with an IQ of 65, that can communicate fluently in sign language and is advertised as biddable, tractable and “guaranteed not to form unions.”
The creator of these fictional beings is Dr. F.N. Stein. He was accused of trampling on the majestic words of the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Normally full of bluster, Dr. Stein paused. He spoke softly and with unusual care. “Of course, I agree those words are true for human beings. But when it comes to those…” and here he gestured to a group of Chimpys on the set of the program, loyally obeying their orders to “eat bananas, scratch and look cute,” “one thing is absolutely certain. I am their creator. I am. And I can assure you that I gave them no such rights.”
Right now these entities are science fiction, but in the future? Can our answer be simply “I am their creator and I have them no such rights”? I found that answer unsatisfying.
The book is about what might happen when unbelievably strange “Others”—strange far beyond Hal or the Chimpy—hit the law and politics of personhood. It is about what might happen to our line.
We will not write the answer to that question on a blank page. Our history, morality, art and our law have been playing with the line for centuries. The book is about what we can learn from that history. And if you think there is no serious issue here, remember that in the past we have declined to recognize the “personhood” of other human beings. That should induce a certain degree of humility.
Q: The scholar David J. Gunkel said of the book, “In this brutally honest and timely book, James Boyle demonstrates how questions that had once been considered science fiction are now a very real and urgent matter.” What do you think of that description?
A: David is too kind. I think my answer above probably says it all.
Q: What would you say are some of the most common perceptions and misconceptions about AI?
A: Most books about AI present a series of standard story-lines. AI is going to a.) destroy the planet b.) take our jobs c.) Empty the world of all meaning as art and language become the province of mindless chatbots d.) Usher us into a benign future of rapid scientific advance where loyal cybernetic servants bring about heaven on earth.
Those are interesting and important concerns and hopes. I even share some of them. But they aren’t what this book is about. The Line does not just focus on how our ideas of personhood and of rights might be changed by interacting with ever more capable AI, it is about how our conceptions of humanity itself will be changed.
Certain moments of human history mark profound reassessments of humanity’s role and place in the world. The rise of secular philosophy, the theory of evolution, the movement for the rights of nonhuman animals; each of these has challenged our story about our own status, our own “human exceptionalism.”
I believe that the quotidian experience of interacting with AI may well be another of those moments. To use just one example, since Aristotle we have been saying that it is language that makes us different – that complex abstract linguistic ability enables both our strategic and our moral sense, makes possible our communities, helps express ethics, humor, wonder and despair.
But chatbots have done what parrots with large vocabularies and sign-language using chimps have not – they have made us aware of a stunning but inescapable fact. Sentences do not imply sentience. How does our conception of humanity and consciousness change after that realization?
Q: What do you see looking ahead when it comes to AI and its uses?
A: There are now hundreds, maybe thousands, of other books trying to answer that question. A robotic Jeeves! A Luddite rebellion! I chose to focus elsewhere. That tactic – examining the overlooked margins – has worked for me in the past.
In terms of the future of AI personhood, I think that it is quite likely that we will one day face AI with abilities that go far beyond the decidedly non-conscious chatbots of today, having what is called Artificial General Intelligence.
In that world, some reasonable informed people will argue that those entities deserve some kind of legal status, either for reasons of empathy and morality – seeing the common consciousness beneath a shiny metallic carapace – or for reasons of convenience. We give the AI legal personhood just as we do to corporations, not out of empathy but so it can sue and be sued.
What will be the shape of those debates? Will your religious beliefs best predict your views? Your politics? Or will it be how much science fiction you have read?
Will liberals think that AI rights are the next frontier of the civil rights movement? Or will they see them as corporate rights run amok – Citizens United on steroids?
Will conservatives see this as unbelievable hubris, arrogating to humans something that is the province of the divine – creating new entities that pretend to a consciousness reserved for God’s children? Or will they view this as the high point of the conservative ideal – a freely choosing mind the liberty of which we must respect; Ayn Rand gone cybernetic?
Or, and we should take the concern seriously, are we idiotically debating the precise nature of the Terminator’s consciousness, even as it plots to kill us all?
Q: What are you working on now?
A: Clearing my desk, but that never stops. Beyond that I have projects ranging from a second edition of a scholarly comic book about the history of musical borrowing, to an open casebook on intellectual property. Like all my work, these books are freely downloadable under Creative Commons Licenses.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: Those who are interested can find the first two chapters of the book here. More soon. Thanks for interviewing me, Deborah.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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