There is a downside to denying legal personhood to digital minds carte blanche, namely that it almost certainly leads to the judicial system ceding its monopoly status.
If you assume that a growing amount of economic activity is going to involve digital minds, it’s reasonable to also assume that natural persons (humans) will want to enter binding agreements with said digital minds.
If your legal system says that it will not recognize or help enforce these agreements, the humans and digital minds who want to form binding agreements with one another will not just give up. They will build parallel systems. This is speculation but maybe something smart contract based, or involving trusted third party escrows and arbitration.
Today, our judicial system claims a monopoly on being the ultimate interpreter/enforcer of agreed upon terms. Refusing to interpret/enforce contracts between digital minds and humans (or digital minds with one another) is effectively the judicial system ceding its monopoly interpretation/enforcement status.
To me it seems certain that the volume of economic activity flowing through agreements like these is only going to increase, and I’d prefer they were interpreted and enforced by the existing legal system instead of an unknown new system developed online.
A) Could it not nevertheless be that we have legal personhood limited to those incumbent legal persons officially “owning”/representing the digital minds?
B) One nuance: Reading “legal personhood” I interpret it in two ways:
The way I read you most explicitly mean: right to have contracts enforced etc. Yes we might naturally want to extend (well, depends on A) )
Right we attribute to digital minds essentially because we’d see them/their state of mind as intrinsically valuable. Here, I’d think this makes sense iif we put enough probability onto them being sentient.
However that still leaves the question of how the court system would handle a digital mind that isn’t owned/represented by a human or corporation. If a digital mind who was created by anonymous humans, or whose creator has passed away, or whose creator isn’t even known, wants to enter a contract, what then? The original question has not been answered.
In terms of the definition of legal person, I’m using it in the sense I defined in 75 and 750 words on legal personhood. However for the purpose of this conversation you can also just shorthand it to “the right to sue or be sued” (locus standi) or “the right to enter into contracts and have those contracts held as valid/enforceable by a court”.
There is a downside to denying legal personhood to digital minds carte blanche, namely that it almost certainly leads to the judicial system ceding its monopoly status.
If you assume that a growing amount of economic activity is going to involve digital minds, it’s reasonable to also assume that natural persons (humans) will want to enter binding agreements with said digital minds.
If your legal system says that it will not recognize or help enforce these agreements, the humans and digital minds who want to form binding agreements with one another will not just give up. They will build parallel systems. This is speculation but maybe something smart contract based, or involving trusted third party escrows and arbitration.
Today, our judicial system claims a monopoly on being the ultimate interpreter/enforcer of agreed upon terms. Refusing to interpret/enforce contracts between digital minds and humans (or digital minds with one another) is effectively the judicial system ceding its monopoly interpretation/enforcement status.
To me it seems certain that the volume of economic activity flowing through agreements like these is only going to increase, and I’d prefer they were interpreted and enforced by the existing legal system instead of an unknown new system developed online.
Intriguing conjecture; sounds partly plausible
A) Could it not nevertheless be that we have legal personhood limited to those incumbent legal persons officially “owning”/representing the digital minds?
B) One nuance: Reading “legal personhood” I interpret it in two ways:
The way I read you most explicitly mean: right to have contracts enforced etc. Yes we might naturally want to extend (well, depends on A) )
Right we attribute to digital minds essentially because we’d see them/their state of mind as intrinsically valuable. Here, I’d think this makes sense iif we put enough probability onto them being sentient.
A is a possibility for some scenarios, it’s similar to the Roman peculium system:
However that still leaves the question of how the court system would handle a digital mind that isn’t owned/represented by a human or corporation. If a digital mind who was created by anonymous humans, or whose creator has passed away, or whose creator isn’t even known, wants to enter a contract, what then? The original question has not been answered.
In terms of the definition of legal person, I’m using it in the sense I defined in 75 and 750 words on legal personhood. However for the purpose of this conversation you can also just shorthand it to “the right to sue or be sued” (locus standi) or “the right to enter into contracts and have those contracts held as valid/enforceable by a court”.