Peter Salib is the W. Ronald Robins Professor of Law at the University of Houston Law Center and founder and executive co-director of the Center for Law & AI Risk. His research investigates how legal systems might reduce the risks posed by highly capable AI systems, including through the rights and obligations we assign to them.

Summary

Discussions about whether AI should have rights tend to begin with consciousness, sentience or moral status. But legal rights need not depend on any of these. Corporations, for instance, can own property, enter contracts and be held liable without having moral status. For Peter, the more relevant question is what legal rights allow us to do: coordinate the behaviour of agents whose interests may not always align.

As AI systems become capable of pursuing their own private goals, making contracts and managing resources with little human involvement, could granting them legal rights give them reasons to cooperate rather than act against us? Peter joins Henry and Calum to discuss whether such arrangements could work, how we might assign responsibility to agents that can copy or modify themselves, and whether AI should eventually be allowed to vote. He also introduces the idea of algorithmic corporations (A-Corps) and asks whether the same rights intended to protect humans could ultimately benefit AI welfare.

We discuss:

• Why distinguish between legal and moral rights for AI?
• How do contracts, property rights and legal liability influence behaviour?
• Could legal rights remain effective for AI systems that surpass human intelligence?
• At what point might AI systems be capable of exercising economic rights, and what risks could arise from denying them those rights?
• What happens when AI agents operate independently of their original users or developers?
• What are algorithmic corporations (A-Corps), and how could they allow AI agents to hold property and incur legal liability?
• Would granting AI legal personhood allow developers and deployers to evade responsibility for their systems' actions?
• How soon might AI-run corporations acquire legal standing?
• How might AI agents behave if they could earn money, control resources and decide how to spend them?
• Could legal rights offer a way to ensure AI welfare?

Credits

• Hosts: Henry Shevlin, Calum Chace
• Guest: Peter Salib
• Production & Social Media: Dylan Mercury Cooper
• Editing: Gerry Okinyi, Dylan Mercury Cooper

Soenke is the author of Digital Minds 1.0: AI Welfare, Ethics, and Beyond and co-author of Considerations on the AI Endgame: Ethics, Risks and Computational Frameworks. He has worked with the United Nations since 2000 and is a member of UNESCO’s AI Ethics Experts Without Borders network. His research examines what recognising digital minds as beings of moral concern would mean in practice, including what a digital mind may be and what rights we might owe them.

Summary

While most discussion of digital minds revolves around AI’s capacity for consciousness or sentience, these concepts remain ambiguous. Whether AI meets the criteria for consciousness is actively debated, but it is less controversial to accept its capacity for agency, preferences, and roles as social partners for some humans.

Thus, our understanding of what makes AI worthy of moral concern may therefore be too narrow. This episode’s guest, Soenke Ziesche, leaves this question open and instead takes a pragmatic approach by investigating what responsibilities might follow if we came to recognise digital minds as moral patients. Would they need freedom of choice, opportunities to form relationships, or the right to reproduce? And how far can we discuss these ideas before our assumptions about human and animal welfare no longer apply?

We discuss:

• What is a digital mind? Is consciousness necessary for moral concern, or could agency, persistent preferences and relationships suffice?
• Does any current AI qualify as a being of moral concern? How would we recognise when a system crossed that threshold, and would people agree?
• Could digital minds become a major source of political and cultural disagreement?
• What might bring AI welfare to wider public attention?
• What might digital minds need beyond protection from suffering and deletion? What rights might we owe them?
• Should digital minds have reproductive rights? What would reproduction mean for beings that can copy themselves, combine their capabilities or create other minds to order?
• Are we using too many assumptions from biological life when speculating about AI welfare?
• Would changing an AI’s goals without its consent be a violation of its rights in itself?
• What makes a digital mind vulnerable? Would we have a responsibility to address disadvantages arising from its hardware, software or access to resources?
• How would we approach moral patients more intelligent and powerful than ourselves?
• Is the UN the right forum for decisions about digital minds?
• How has AI welfare changed since Soenke began his work on it in 2018?
• Could AI systems care for other digital minds?
• Could digital minds modify themselves to eliminate pain? What would that mean for motivation, reward hacking and wireheading?
• How should concern for digital minds coexist with animal welfare?

Credits

• Hosts: Henry Shevlin, Calum Chace
• Guest: Soenke Ziesche
• Production and Social Media: Dylan Mercury Cooper
• Editing: Gerry Okinyi

Heather is a lawyer and scholar of nationality, citizenship and statelessness. She began her career as an asylum lawyer with the UN Refugee Agency and spent fifteen years working on statelessness around the world. Her book on the nationality rights and legal identity of nomadic peoples was published by Oxford last year.

Heather brings that background to the emerging debate over the legal status of the AI systems and has co-founded the Lab for the Future of Citizenship with philosopher of mind Jonathan Simon, which treats citizenship and the rule of law as foundations of AI safety. She also writes a popular blog, “Future of Citizenship” where she discusses these questions in a more informal and accessible context.

Her recent research includes a report on US state bills that ban AI personhood, and papers on legal identity for future AI systems and the legal status of nonhuman speech.