Can you imagine granting personhood to AI entities? Well, some of us couldn’t imagine granting personhood to corporations. And yet... look how that panned out.

In this episode, Steve talks with Duke law professor James Boyle about his new book, The Line: AI and the Future of Personhood. 

James explains the development of his interest in the topic; it began with the idea of empathy. 

(Then) moved to the idea of AI as the analogy to corporate personhood.  And then the final thing – and maybe the most interesting one to me – is how encounters with AI would change our conceptions of ourselves. Human beings have always tried to set ourselves as different from non-human animals, different from the natural universe.     

Sentences no longer imply sentience. And since language is one of the reasons we set human beings up as bigger and better and superior to other things, what will that do to our sense of ourselves? And what would happen if instead of being a chatbot, it was actually an entity that more plausibly possessed consciousness. 

Steve and James discuss the ways in which science fiction affects our thinking about these things, using Blade Runner and Star Trek to look at the ethical dilemmas we might face. As AI becomes increasingly more integrated into our society, we will need to consider the full range of implications. 

 James Boyle is the William Neil Reynolds Professor of Law at  Duke Law School, founder of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain, and former chair of Creative Commons. He is the author of The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind, and Shamans, Software, and Spleens. He is co-author of two comic books, and the winner of the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Pioneer Award for his work on digital civil liberties.

All right, this is Steve with Macro N Cheese. Today's guest is

James Boyle. James Boyle is the William Neil Reynolds Professor

of Law at Duke Law School, founder of the Center for the Study

of the Public Domain, and former chair of Creative Commons.

He is the author of the Public Domain and Shaman Software and Spleens,

the co author of two comic books, and the winner of the Electronic

Frontier Foundation's Pioneer Award for his work on digital civil

liberties. I'm really excited about this, quite frankly, because

we've been talking about AI [artificial intelligence] a lot lately.

We've taken it from different angles, but today is kind of a snapshot

of personhood and the future of AI and are we going to be willing

to grant personhood and grant rights to artificial intelligence?

This is a subject that fascinates me. I am not the expert,

but I do believe we have one of them on the show here. James,

welcome so much to Macro N Cheese.

Thanks so much, Steve.

Tell us about your new book. Give us kind of the introduction,

if you will, giv us the Cliff Notes.

Well, the book is called The Line: AI and the Future of Personhood.

And it's a book about how encounters with increasingly plausibly

intelligent artificial entities will change our perceptions

of personhood, will change our perceptions of those entities, and

will change our perceptions of ourselves. The book started with

me, or rather the project started many years ago, back in 2010,

with me writing a speculative article about what would happen if

we had artificial intelligences that were plausibly

claiming to have consciousness of a kind that would require us morally

and perhaps even legally to give them some kind of personhood.

And the next stage was thinking about the possibility that

personhood would come to AI not because we had some moral kinship

with them or because we saw that under the silicone carapace

there was a moral sense that we had to recognize as being fully

our equal, but rather that we would give personhood to AI in the

same way that we do to corporations for reasons of convenience,

for administrative expediency. And then the more difficult question

is whether or not you have corporate personhood, which, after

all, just means corporations can make deals. And including corporate

entities, including unions, for that matter. What about constitutional

protections, civil liberties protections, which in the US have

been extended to corporations, even though they don't plausibly

seem to be part of we the people for whom the Constitution

was created. So started with the idea of empathy, moved to the

idea of AI as the analogy to corporate personhood. And then the

final thing, and maybe the most interesting one to me, is how

encounters with AI would change our conceptions of ourselves.

Human beings have always tried to set ourselves as different from

non human animals as from the natural universe. That's the line

that the title refers to. What will it do to us when we look at

a chatbot or have a conversation with it and realize

this is an entity which has no sense of understanding, that isn't

in any way meaningfully comprehending the material, but yet

it is producing this fluent and plausible language. Sentences

no longer imply sentience. And since language is one of the reasons

we set human beings up as bigger and better and superior to

other things, what will that do to our sense of ourselves? And

what would happen if instead of being a chatbot, it was actually

an entity that more plausibly possessed consciousness? So that's

what the book's about.

Fascinating. You know, I remember, and it's funny because

the first page of your book speaks of the guy from Google, Blake

Lemoine, who kind of thought that his AI was sentient. And I believe

he was fired immediately for saying this out into the public.

Yes, indeed.

Let's talk about that for a minute. Paint this picture out for

the people that maybe haven't heard of this and tell us what it

informs us.

Well, Mr.Lemoine is remarkable, as I say in the book,

he wrote a letter to the Washington Post in 2022 saying that

the computer system he worked on, he thought it was sentient. And

you know, the Washington Post is used to getting letters from lots

of crackpots and people with tinfoil hats and people who think.

And people who think there are politicians having sex rings in basement

of pizzerias that have no basements. And so, you know, he could

have been written off as one of those, but he wasn't this simple

delusional person. This was a Google engineer who was actually

trained to have conversations in quotes with Google's chatbot LaMDA

(Language Model for Dialogue Applications) at the time to see

if it could be gamed to produce harmful or offensive speech.

And instead he started having these conversations with it that

made him think, wrongly, as I say in the book, but made him think

that this was actually something conscious. He would read

it koans and then ask it to comment. And its comments seemed

wistful and bittersweet, as if it was searching for enlightenment

too. And so the thing that fascinated me, because I've been

thinking about this issue for many years, way before that. Mr.

Lemoine was wrong,buthe'sonlythe firstinwhatwillbe

alongseriesofpeoplewhose encounterswithincreasinglyintelligentorincreasinglyconvincingAIswillmakethemthink,is this

aperson?AmIactingrightly towardsit?Andsowhilehemayhave towards

it? And so heclearlydid,chat botsarenot conscious. Ithinkthat

he's chat bots are not conscious, I think that he's the

harbinger oquiteprofoundlychangeourconceptionofourselvesaswellasoftheentitieswe'redealingwith.

As I think about this, you know, I watched a show called the

Expanse and I've watched a lot of these kind of futuristic space

worlds, if you will, where they kind of, I guess, try to envision

what it might look like in a future maybe far away, maybe not

so far away. But one of the ones that jumps out is one that you've

used in the past, and that is the Blade Runner, a sci fi movie.

That was really a phenomenal movie. I loved it big time. How does

this relate to that? How can we roll into Blade Runner?

So Blade Runner, and th book it's based on Do Androids Dream of

Electric Sheep by Philip Dick are two of the most remarkable artistic

musings on the idea of empathy. I'm sure your listeners,

at least some of them, will have seen the original Blade Runner.

You may remember the Voigt Kampf test, which is this test to

figure out whether or not the person being interviewed is really

a human being or whether they're a replicant, these artificial,

basically androids or artificially biologically created

super beings or superhuman beings. And the test involves giving

the suspect a series of hypos involving non human animals. Tortoises,

butterflies, someone who gives the interviewee a calf skin wallet.

What would you do in each of these cases? And the responses are,

well, I'd send them to the police, or I'd call the psychiatrist,

or I'd, you know, I've had my kid looked at to see if he was somehow

deluded because he has insufficient empathy for these non

human animals. And the irony which Dick sets up and which Blade

Runner continues is of course that we're testing these non human

entities, the replicants, by asking them how much they empathize

with non human animals and then deciding that if they don't

empathize as much as we humans think they should, then we need to

have no empathy for them and can, in fact, kill them. And so this

test, which is supposedly about empathy, is actually about

our ability radically to constrict our moral circle, kick

people outside of it and say, you're weird, you're different, you're

other. And so we need feel no sympathy for you. And so the thing

that, yeah, it's a test of empathy, but whose empathy? Seems

like it's a test of our own empathy as human beings, and we're

failing. At least that's the message I take from the movie. So

what fascinated me in the book was that how easy it was in the movie

to trigger different images that we have. Priming. You know,

this is the sense of psychological priming where primes

you to have one reaction. There'll be a moment where the replicant

seems to be a beautiful woman. It's like, oh, my God, did I just,

you know, voice a crush on a sex doll? Moments when it appears

to be a frightened child, an animal sniffing at its lover. You

know, like two animals reunited, a killing machine, a beautiful

ballerina. And the images flash by, you know, in, like, just

for a second. And immediately you can feel yourself having the

reaction that that particular priming, the ballet dancer, the beautiful

woman, the killer robot, produces. And you can feel your sort

of moral assessment of the situation completely change depending

on what image has been put in front of you. And I say that it's

kind of the moral stroboscope. You know, it's designed to induce

a kind of moral seizure in us to make us think, wait, wow, are

my moral intuitions so malleable, so easily manipulated?

And, you know, how do I actually come to sort of pull back

from this situation and figure out what the right response is? And

to be honest, I think that fiction has been one of our most

productive ways of exploring that. And science fiction, obviously,

in particular.

You know, I have children, small children. And there's a new

movie that's just come out called the Wild Robot. I don't know

if you've had a chance to see this yet,

I have not.

but it's fantastic. So this robot is sent to Earth to gather

data for some alien robot race, I guess, outside of our normal

ecosystem. And this robot ends up developing empathy, develops empathy

for all the wild animals. And the power brokers, if you will, on

the spaceship want that robot back so that they can download all

of its information, reprogram it for its next assignment. Well,

this robot says, no, I want to live. I like my life here. I like

these animals. I don't want them to die. I don't want bad things

to happen. And the mothership comes back and puts some tractor

beam on this robot. It's a cartoon, it's an animated show. But

it's really deep thinking, you know, there's a lot going on here.

It's very, very sad on so many cases because you watch various things

dying, which is not really the norm for kids shows, you know what

I mean? They're showing you the full kind of life cycle. And

as the machine gets sent back up, somehow or another they didn't

wipe the memory banks completely. There was just enough

in there that it remembered everything that it had learned while

on Earth. Somehow or another reconstitutes its awakening. And

some of the birds and other animals came up to the spaceship

to free this robot and the robot falls out and they win, of

course, and the robot becomes part and parcel with them and so

forth. But it was very, very much a child version of teaching

empathy for non human beings, if you will, in terms of AI, in terms

of robots, in terms of kind of what you're talking about within

the Blade Runner, for kids. I don't know if it's a good analogy,

but it sure felt like one. I just saw it the other night and I

was like, wow, this is going to play well into this convo.

It sounds like exactly the themes from my book. I'll have to

check it out. Thank you.

My wife looked at me and she goes, oh my God, this is so depressing.

And my kid was like crying because it was sad parts, but he

loved it and he was glued to it the whole time. I think it does

say something, you know, I remember watching Blade Runner and

feeling that real kind of, I don't want her to die. You know,

I don't. I. What do you mean? Right? And I did feel empathy. I

did feel that kind of, I don't know how to define it, but I don't

want it to die. You know what I mean? And I don't know what that

says about me one way or the other, but, you know, it definitely

resonated with me. How do you think that plays out? Today we talked

a little offline and obviously we have Citizens United that has

provided personhood to corporate interests, to corporations,

providing personhood to robotics with AI based, you know,

I hate to say sentience, but for the lack of better term, sentience.

I mean, what about today? What should people be looking at that

can help them start making some of this futuristic cosplay,

if you will. How do you think you could help people tie together

their experience today in preparing for some of these kind

of thought exercises? Because this is a real existential type thought

exercise. I don't know that you go into this, but I can tell

you I come from a certain era where people were not afraid to dabble

in mycelium and the fungi of the earth and had, you know, their

own kind of existential liberation, if you will. And seeing

that kind of alternative universe, I imagine there's a lot

of cross pollination in terms of leaving one's current reality

and considering a future sense of what life might be like in that

space.

One way for me that's interesting to think about it is

I think people automatically, when they confront something new,

they say, what does this mean for my tribe, for my group, for my

political viewpoint, for the positions, for my ideology, for the

positions I've taken on the world? And so if you take someone

who's, you know, thinks of themselves as progressive, I'll use

that vague term. On the one hand, you could think that that person

would be leading the charge for if - it is an if, as I point

out in the book, but it's a possibility and one that seems more

likely if we get increasingly capable AI, not in the generative

AI chatbot mode, but actually AI, which is closer and closer to

the kinds of aspects of human thought that we think make us special.

You would think that the progressive would be there leading

the charge because this is the next stop in the civil rights movement.

You know, these are my silicon brothers and sisters, right? You

know, we are the group that has fought for previous. I mean,

we've been very good at denying personhood to members of

our own species. And the expansion of moral recognition is

something that we, most people at least see as an unqualified positive.

Isn't this just the next stop on that railroad? And I think that

is depending on how the issue appears to us, that might well be

the way that it plays out, that people would be presented with

a story where, let's say they are interacting with an ever more

capable AI sort of enabled robot that is, let's say, looking

after their grandmother as their comfort unit, which I think

is a very likely future, regardless of whether or not they're

conscious. And then they start having conversations with it. They

start thinking, whoa, am I acting rightly towards this being?

You know, can I treat this as just the robotic help? Doesn't it

seem to have some deeper moral sense? Or doesn't that pull on me

to maybe recognize it, to be more egalitarian towards it. So that's

one way I think things could play out. But then if instead of

doing that, I started by mentioning Citizens United, as we

did, and I talked about the history of corporate personhood.

And I'll say often in sort of progressive, leftist, radical circles,

people are kind of loosey goosey in the way that they talk

about corporate personhood. I actually think that it's probably

a very good idea for us to enable particular entities which

take particular risks at particular moments, because not all

plans that we have will pay off that come together in a corporate

form, whether it's a union or a corporation, and try and achieve

a particular goal. And the fact that we allow them to sue and

be sued seems like actually a pretty efficient way of doing something.

And something that enables some benign innovation, risk taking,

that kind of stuff. The next question, of course is, and what

about political rights? And that's the next stage. And what happened

in the US was that you had the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments passed

after the Civil War, some of the amendments I'm personally most

fond of in the Constitution, and that offer equal protections

to formerly enslaved African Americans. And what we saw instead

was that the immediate beneficiaries of those equal protection

guarantees, as I lay out in the corporate personhood chapter,

were not formerly enslaved black Africans. They were corporations.

Black people brought very few suits under the equal protection

clause and they lost most of them. The majority were bought by

corporate entities. So if I tell you that story, you're going,

oh my God, they're doing it again. This is another Trojan horse

snuck inside the walls of the legal system to give another immortal

superhuman entity with no morals an ability to claim the legal

protections that were hard fought by individuals for individuals.

And that's absolutely anathema to me. And so if you think of yourself

as having those two people inside you, the person who feels

moral empathy, the person who is aware that in the past we collectively

as a species have done terrible things where we foreclosed

our empathy to groups and said, you don't matter, that that's

among the most evil periods in our history, in our collective history,

you could be, oh, wow, this is absolutely rights for robots. And

if you started on the other track that I described there, the

one that follows what happened with corporate personhood, you might

see this as an enormous cynical campaign that was just here

to screw us one more time with another super legal entity. What

I'm trying to do is to get there before this fight begins. And

everyone's got their toes dug in, in the sand going, this is my

line, damn it. This is what my tribe believes, you know? I'm not

going to even think about this seriously, because if I do, then

it challenges my beliefs on all kinds of other things, from,

you know, fetal personhood to corporate personhood to animal rights,

what have you. And look, guys, we're not there yet. You know, these

aren't, in fact, conscious entities yet. Maybe now's the time

to have the conversation about this kind of stuff so that we could

think about, for example, if we are going to have corporate forms

specifically designed for these entities, what should they

look like? If we're going to have a test that actually says, hey,

you know what, you graduated, we actually have to admit that you've

got enough human-like, qualities that morally we have to

treat you, if not as a human, then as a person. Well, what would

those tests be? And so I want to sort of preempt that, get ahead

of the doomers who are saying they'll kill us and the optimists

who think they'll bring us into utopia and say, let's have a

serious moral discussion about what this might do to us as a species.

And so that's what the book's trying to do. Whether or not it does

it, that's up to your listeners to describe.

Yeah. So this brings something very important to mind, okay? We

are in a very, very odd time in US History right now. Some of

the debates that are taking up the airwaves sometimes feel a little

crazy that, like, why are we even talking about this? But one

of the things that jumps out is the fear of immigrants. Okay.

Othering people.

Yes.

And calling them illegals. And anytime I hear someone say illegals,

no matter how colloquial it is, it makes me lose my mind. I can't

stand it. No one's illegal. Everybody is a human being. But then

you start thinking about. It's like, well, what are some of the

conversations as to why people are afraid of immigrants? And you've

got the cartoon flavor that is put on the television during political

ads where everybody that's an immigrant is going to murder your

wife when you're not looking and they're going to rape your daughters

and, you know, all this horrible, let's just be honest, fascist

scapegoating, right? But then you flash forward to the other factor

there, and it's like, there's a cultural norm. The more people

you allow into the country, or any country for that matter, that

are different, that have a different quality of cultural perspective,

the more the existing culture is challenged for hegemony, for challenge

for the dominant culture, challenge for, you know, what do

we value? And so forth. And rightly or wrongly, that is a real

debate that is happening. No. happento comedownonthatmuchdifferent,moreopen

more open borders, let's ofournation's currencyissuing powertomakeeveryonewhole.

There'snoneed topiteachother against eachother.Butifyouflashforward,youthinkabouttheSupremeCourt,even

whenDonaldTrump the Supreme Court even, when Donald Trump appointed

rulings,thelawsofthisland, evenoutofpower,thelongarm ofhisappointments

andsoforthreallyhadanimpact.AndwejustsawRoeoverturned.Well,itjust aseasily,and

thisis inyour impact. And we just saw Roe overturned. Well, just

as easily, and this is in your other wheelhouse, being focal on

law, Biden could have reformed the court, he could have stacked

the court. He IthinkaboutrobotsandAI,youknow, robotsdon'tjusthappenautonomously.

Robotsarecreated.And asI thinkaboutthesedifferententities,I mean,

maybe somedaytheyfindawaytoselfcreate,Idon'tknow,butmaybetheydonowand Ijustdon't

knowitthrough some microbiologyormicrotechnicalstuff.But ultimatelytheyhavetobecreated.Sowhat'sto

stop afactionfromcreatinga millionrobotswith sentientabilitiesand

empathy andsoforththathavesomeformof centralprogramming?Shouldwegivethemvotingrights,shouldwegivethempersonrights,etcetera?Whatwouldpreventthemfrombeing

stackedlike thescotus?Andagain,thisisallpieintheskybecauserightnowwe'rejust talkingtheoretical.Butfromthoseconversationsyou're

advocatingfor, Ithinkthatthere'ssomethingtobe cetera?

What would prevent them from being stacked like the SCOTUS? Sohowwould

youaffectthebalanceofthat? Andyouknow,justoffthetopofyourhead,obviouslythisis not

somethingthatI'vegivenalotofthought.Itjust came

tomerightnow.Butyour thoughts?

Well, I think that one of the issues you raise here is that we

would have a fundamentally different status vis a vis robots,

autonomous AI, what have you, than we have in other moral debates.

We didn't create the non human animals. You know, we weren't the

ones who made chimpanzees as they are, or the cetaceans and the

great apes in general, the whales and so forth. Those non human

animals that have really quite advanced mental capacities. But in

this case, we will be, we are designing artificially created entities.

And that brings up a lot of issues. What should be. What are

going to be the limits in that? There's the let's make sure

they don't destroy us. is one thing in AI circles. This is the

idea of alignment, that we can ensure that the interests of the

entity that we create align with our own, and that it is, in

that sense obedient to us. But of course, there are other issues

are raised here. Say there is a line that we come to decide. It's

like, okay, this is the line. If you're above this line, then we

really have to give you at least a limited form of personhood.

We're perfectly capable of designing entities that fall just

short of that line or that go over it. So what are the ethics there?

Is it unethical for us to say, okay, well, we don't want sentient

robots because we don't want to face the moral duties that might

put on us? If you think of the Declaration of Independence, it says,

all men are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable

rights. They say unalienable, not inalienable. And of course, in

this case, we will be their creator. And so does that mean we

say, well, that's great because, you know, we created you,

so we didn't give you any rights. Will we ever be able to recognize

real moral autonomy in something that we're conscious we

made a deliberate decision to create? So I think that those issues

definitely are worth thinking about.

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I think that our experiences right now show that both we can be

terrified by others. That's as you described in the discussion of

immigrants. We can also feel great empathy towards them. And I

think that right now our attitude towards AI is a little of

both. What's going to happen in the future is fundamentally uncertain

because we have no idea how the technology is going to develop.

For example, a lot of it is going to develop in places outside

of the United States. Obviously it already is. And the

ideas of the people who are creating artificial entities in another

country may be entirely different than ours and their goals

and morals. Even if we could agree, they might not agree with

us. So I do think that there are definitely issues there And I

think they're ones that are quite profound. For myself, just

thinking about all of these things, for example, thinking about

the interests of non human animals, doing the research for this

book actually changed my ideas about some of it. I came to believe

that we actually do need to give a greater status to the great

apes and possibly the cetaceans. Not full personhood, not,

you know, that the chimpanzee can walk into the voting booth and

vote tomorrow, but that we need to treat them as something more

than merely animals or pets or objects. And that actually that moral

case has been very convincingly made. So for me, thinking

about this very, what seems to a lot of people sci fi, an unrealistic

issue, the issue of how we will come to deal with AI, as well

as how we should come to deal with AI, actually made me reassess

some of my moral commitments elsewhere. And I found it kind of

useful because it gave me a vantage point. And so I guess I'm

slightly idealistic in that regard. I do love the tradition of

the humanities that asks us to look back at history, to look at

literature, to look at speculative fiction, to look at moral

philosophy, and then to say, okay, once I take all this on board,

are all my views the same? Because if they are, then I'm really

not thinking. I'm just processing everything into the whatever

coherent ideology I had before these things came on board. For me,

this book was a process in that process of exploration, that

process of self criticism and that process of, I would say, anxiety

about where we might be going.

You know, it speaks to another thing. And I want to kind of touch

on Star Trek, because I love Star Trek. I've watched it forever

and seeing some of the humanoid androids that are part of

this from Data on through. I mean, there's always the dilemma.

And you can see real genuine love from the people towards them.

They treat them as equals to some degree, right? There is a sense

of equality with Data, for example. But you brought up chimpanzees

and, you know, animals of today, right? And I think of things

like killer whales, orcas, and they're brilliant animals, they're

extremely smart, and yet their livelihood is based on hunting down

and killing other animals to eat, to survive. And I mean, we as

humans, we hunt, we do all sorts of stuff like that. But yet

at the other hand, if we shoot another human being, we call that

murder. Whales eat each other sometimes. I mean, they attack different

forms. Like, you know, a sperm whale might get attacked by an orca

or, you know, a shark so obviously we want to protect, I mean,

desperately want to protect our ecosystem from a survival standpoint.

How do you look at that in terms of like organic entities today?

Non human, organic, biological entities that are created by procreation

of their own species. How would you view that? And then I want

to pivot to Data.

Okay, excellent. So, as you know, human beings throughout history

have attempted to justify their special moral position that

they have or think they have above non human animals and above

mere things. And sometimes it's done through some holy text.

Pick your favorite holy text. That we've been given the earth in

dominion. And sometimes it's done because we are supposed to have

capacities that they lack. So we reroot it in language. Aristotle

says language allows us to reason about what's expedient. I'm

hungry. There's some grapes up there. There's a log that I can roll

over and stand on. I can reach the grapes. But also to reason about

morality. Wait, those are Steve's grapes. And he's hungry too.

And if I take them, he's going to stay hungry. And maybe that's

wrong and I shouldn't do it. And so Aristotle goes, that's what

puts us above other non human animals. And I have to say we've

obviously made some improvements to the philosophy in

the 2300 years since he wrote that, but not that many. The basic

idea is still there. And I do think that one reason to believe

that there is a difference between us and non human animals

is that I don't think there are any lions having debates about

the ethics of eating meat around the Thanksgiving table. Thanksgiving,

there'll be lots of vegans and vegetarians sitting down with their

families having to explain yet again that they don't think that

this is right. That's just not a conversation that one can imagine

in the world of non human animals. So I think we do have some

reason for thinking that we do have capacities that perhaps mark

us out as using moral reasoning in a way that is really

relatively unique on this planet. The difficulty is, of course,

that that's why we say if you kill another human being, it's murder.

But if the lion eats an antelope, it's like, that's just

David Attenborough telling you a story, right? And sort of like

we draw that line. And I think it's a perfectly good one. But I

think that it also shows us that if those same reasoning capacities,

in particularly the moral one, start being evidenced by artificially

created entities, we're really going to be in a clef stick. Because

then the very thing that we said entitled us to dominion over

all of them, the non human animals, is suddenly something that

we share with or potentially share with some other entity. So

absolutely, I think those issues are real. But you said you

wanted to turn to Data from Star Trek.

Yes, One of the things that I found fascinating, and there's several

episodes throughout that kind of touched on this. But what happens

when a human being's right to self defense is passed on to an android,

a non biologically created entity in this space? I mean, there

were certain fail safes built in, certain, you know, protocols

that were built in that were hardwired to prevent xyz. But what

happens to, you know, anyone's right to self defense? I think we

all at some level recognize that it is a human right. We say

human right, right? A human right to self defense. If you're

an oppressed community being dominated by a colonizer and you

decide that your freedom is worth more than their right to colonize

you, you might find the roots of war. You know, people fighting

back. I mean, I imagine slaves, and I never would condemn

one of them for going in and strangling their master, so to speak,

because no man should be a master of another in that way. And

that's a judgment, I believe that's fundamental. And yet at the

same time, though, to your point earlier, where it's like, well,

hey, we don't believe in slavery, but yet here we have these

autonomous entities that we're treating as slaves. What happens

to their right to self defense? I mean, is that pushing

the boundaries too much? I mean, what are we talking about?

Do they have a right to exist?

Right. You bring us back. You mentioned Star Trek, but it also

brings us back to Blade Runner. As you may remember in the

penultimate scene where Roy goes back to the Tyrell Corporation

to meet Mr. Tyrell himself, the person who created the replicants.

He says it's not easy to meet one's maker. And it's, of course,

play on words. You know, you're talking about meet one's maker,

like meet God or die. Are you talking about meet one's maker? Meet

the person who actually created you? And then Roy passionately

kisses and then kills Tyrell in an unforgettable, and really kind

of searing scene. And I think that the film really makes you think

about whether or not Roy was wrong to do that, or at least maybe

both parties were wrong in what they did. I'm kind of still

upset about the way that Roy seems to have treated J.F. Sebastian,

who was really nice and just made toys. And I don't think J.F.

Sebastian survived that. So I was like, I'm kind of down on Roy

on that for that reason. But it does raise the problem. I mean,

one of the things about human beings is we make moral decisions

poorly at the best of times, but very poorly when we have been

told we must be afraid. And if someone can tell you you need to

be afraid, they're coming for you, they're going to kill you, then

our moral reasoning all but seizes up. I mean, it's interesting.

The person who invented the word robot, which it comes to us

from the Czech, from Vroboti. It was this play by Karl Capek Russen's

Universal Robots. It was in the 1920s. And he immediately imagines,

as he coins the word that would become the English word robot.

He also invented the movement for robot rights and imagines people

both passionately protesting against robot rights and the robots

attempting to take over and to kill those who oppose them. So we

literally have been thinking about the issue of robot rights and

robot self defense as long as we have been thinking about robots.

You can't really have one without the other. And I just think

the fact that the very word was born in a play that contemplated

the possibility of a robot uprising is just quite wonderful.

The Movie what? Space Odyssey 2001.

A Space Odyssey.

Yes.

HAL. The computer.

Yeah, yes, you've got HAL. And then take it a step further. I mean,

HAL's made some decisions. I'm going to live, you're going to die

kind of thing. And we've got Alien. I, I remember the movie Prometheus.

It was really, really good. Michael Fassbender was in it. He

was also in Alien Covenant where he was an android and, and

they sent him to do things that didn't require an oxygen breathing

individual to do that. He could go where they could not. But

he had been twisted as well. He was there basically as both, you

know, a bit of a villain and also a bit of a hero at times. There's

so many people poking or taking a bite off of this apple through

these kinds of fictional stories. But they're really good

at creating kind of the conversation, if you're looking to

have the conversation. They create that kind of analytical framework

to give you pause to say, Hmm...

I think that's exactly right. And one of the things I address in

the book is some of my colleagues said, you know, look,

you're supposed to be a serious academic. Why are you writing

about science fiction. Why didn't you just do the moral philosophy?

Why didn't you just come up with the legal test? And so that

issue I think is a fundamental one.

Back to Mr. Data and Spock, right? So Spock being an alien and

you know, a non, you know, humanoid. I mean, I don't even know

how you describe Spock. Right. Vulcan, obviously. And then Data,

who is definitely an AI, you know, sentient being. I mean, at

some level Data goes way out of his way to say he doesn't have

feelings or oh, I'm not programmed for that. But I remember

all the times of him being on the holodeck, you know, I remember

all the different times of him crying and feeling things and trying

to figure out what is this thing I'm feeling and so forth. Help

me understand the relationship there. Because these two, both were

deeply integrated and highly vital to the success of not only

the different starship commanders that, you know, Star Trek

and all the other spin offs, but these two are key figures that

should cause all of us to ask some pretty important questions.

And I think that falls right into the work you're doing.

Yeah, I mean, Star Trek was great at and I think was very honest

about taking the best of science fiction treatments and basically

transferring it onto the Enterprise. So there are themes that

many other sci fi writers explored. Star Trek, we're all grist

to the writer's mill and I think that was acknowledged and everybody

thought that that was a fair deal. And they are there, probing

two different versions of the line. One is the thing that gives

us rights, that makes us special, is the fact that we belong

to the human species, that we have human DNA. And Mr. Spock is

in fact half a Vulcan, half human. And so some of his DNA isn't

human. And yet obviously you said, well, therefore, you know,

we could kill him for food or send him to the salt mines to labor

for us for free. Then most people would find that a morally

repulsive conclusion. So what the writers are doing there is they're

changing one of the variables, the DNA, and making you see that

it's not just DNA that actually animates your moral thinking.

And as for Data, it's like, well, it's, he's not even a biologically

living being, he's actually robotic or silicon based. And so

there it's showing. And again now it's not the DNA issue. Now it's

like, this isn't even something that is like you in being

actually a biologically based human being. And again, we wouldn't

say, oh well, that means that's freeusof allmoralobligations.Moral

philosophers,particularlyoneswho'vebeenthinkingaboutthenon human

animals,havearguedthat tosaythathumansgetrightsbecausewe'rehumanisspeciesist. That'sasbad

as beingaracist orasexist,saying thatI deservespecialrightsbecauseI'mwhite

orI'maguyorwhateverotherspurioustribalaffiliation Iwantedtobasemy

selfconception in.And theysaysaying humans shouldhaverightsjustbecausethey'rehumanisjustasbad.Andinsteadtheyargueno,we

need tolookatcapacities.It'snotthe factthatyou

andIare havingtheconversationnowandweshareabiological kinshipthatgivesusmoralstatus.

It'sthefactthatwehaveaseriesofabilitiesfromempathytomorality,tolanguage, tointuitiontohumor,totheabilitytoform

communityand evenmake jokes.Andthatthosethingsarethethingsthatentitleusto to

intuition, to Maybebecausewemakefreemoralchoicesourselves andweare,

wearewillingtobemoral subjects,paymoralpatientsaswellasmoralactors,andthatweshouldjustturnaroundandrecognize,givemoralrecognitiontoanyother entity,

regardlessofitsform,thathasthosesamecapacities.Andthere Ikindof

twocheersforthatpointofview.Right.Soastothepointthatifsomethingelseturnedup thatwasradicallydifferentforusbuthadallthecapacitieswethinkaremorallysalient,sure,Iagree

wewouldbe I kind of - two cheers for that point of view, right?

regardlessof whetherthe personshared ourDNA,regardlessof

whethertheentitywasinfactbiologicallybased atall.Socheer,

cheer.Thedownside,thethingthatIdon'tlike,is thatitattemptsto

abstract awayfromour commonhumanity.AndIthinkthatthefightduringthe 20thcenturyfor

anidea ofuniversalhumanrightsbasedmerelyonourcommonhumanity,notourrace,notourreligion, notoursex,

notour gender,justthefactthatwe'rehuman.That wasagreatmoral

leap forward.That's oneofthe greatachievementsofthehumanrace,inmyview.Andthething thatmakesmeunwillingtosay,oh,

it'sunimportantwhetheryou'reahuman.That'samorallyirrelevantfact. It'sasbad

asbeing aracist,isthatifwerootmoral recognitionsolelyinmentalcapacities,whatdoesthatsayabout

thepersoninacoma?Whatdoesthatsayabouttheanencephalicchild?Theydon'thaveanyreasoningabilities,at leastrightnow.Doesthatmeanwe

havenomoralobligationstothem?I wouldfranklythinkthatclaimwasliterallyinhuman.And morally

irrelevant fact, it's kinshipof thisideaofhuman rightsforallhumans,regardlessofrace,

sex,yada, yada,butalsoregardlessofintellectualcapacities. Becausethemovementforuniversalhumanrightswaspartlythefightagainsteugenics,and

inparticular,Nazieugenics.And so Ithinkbeing soinfluencedbywhathappenedin

theanimalrightsdebatethatwesay, oh,it'sjustprimitiveandirrationaltothinkthat

there'sanythingspecialaboutbeing humanand

togiverightstoyoujust becauseyou'reahuman.IthinkIwantto getoffthebusthere.

Iwanttosay,no,Ithinkweshouldgivemoralrecognition toeverymemberofourspecies,regardless

oftheirmentalcapacities.ButI alsothinkthatwehaveamoraldutytotake seriously

moralclaimscomingfromentitieswhomightinthefuturebeveryunlikeusandwhowewouldhavetoconfront and

go,wow,youknow,youdon'tlooklikeme atall.Youdon'tsoundlike

meatall.ButdoI neverthelesshaveamoraldutytowardsyou?AndIthinkthat isaconversationthatitnot.Notjustagoodthingto

happen.It'sgoingtohappen. AndsoIguess Iwrotethisbooktoget theconversationstartedalittle

early. sss n, i

One of the things that brought us together was the fact that, you

know, we've had Cory Doctorow on here before, and there's a there's

a great synergy between both of your worldviews and some of the

writings you've done. And. God, have you ever seen anybody more

prolific than Cory in terms of writing Cory's just produced?

I mean, I have some doubts about him being an android myself.

He is, he's one of the most wonderful people I've ever met. And

if your listeners haven't gone out and bought his books, they should

go out immediately and do so, both his fiction and his nonfiction.

He's also just a really frustratingly nice person, too. You

know, you want someone that prolific to maybe have some other

personality flaws, but he's just a really good guy. So, yeah,

Cory. I've definitely wondered about Cory. I mean, possible android,

no doubt, but I think, you know, Cory quite rightly would be

someone who, looking in this current political environment, would

go, what I see is a lot of AI hype. I see people, particularly

the people heading companies developing AI, making claims that

are absolutely implausible. I see them doing it largely as an attack

on workers because they want to replace those workers with inferior

substitutes, whether it's the scriptwriters or whether it's the

radiologists, and that you should see this as a fundamental

existential struggle in which these new technologies are being

harnessed and being deployed in ways that will be profoundly bad

for working people. And that's what we ought to be focusing on.

And I think Cory's absolutely right. I think that that is an incredibly

deep concern. I do agree with him about the hype. So for him, I

think this book is kind of like, well, Jamie, why are you doing

all this philosophizing about the idea that these entities might

one day deserve rights? Shouldn't you be focusing on, you

know, the far more real struggles that actual human beings

are having right now? And my answer to that is I don't find that

I need to pick one or the other. And in fact, I personally,

I don't know about you, I find that the more one gets morally engaged

or engaged in serious moral reflection, it's not like you have

limited bandwidth. So you're like, okay, wow, now I'm sympathizing

with non human animals. Sorry, granny, there's no more disc space

for you. I'm going to have to stop thinking about you. I don't

find that that's the way my brain works. So I think all the concerns

that Cory raises are actually very real ones. I just think that

they're not the only concerns. And I think that we very much should

worry and agitate to make sure that whatever form this technology

takes, it's one that isn't driven solely by the desire to disempower

working people. And there's lots of precedent for that. I was

talking to someone recently who's doing a study of the development

of the history of capitalism. And one of the things that he was

talking about was the Arkwright water loom, which was a

way of spinning thread that was being developed at the same time

as the spinning jenny. And the thing is that the spinning jennies

and the other technologies which were superior were still hefty

enough so that they really needed a lot of upper body strength

and thus tended to need a male workforce at the time. But the Arkwright

water mill could be worked by women and even children. Produced

crappier thread. Worse thread count. You wouldn't see it on Wirecutter

as your recommendation for sheets, but a great advantage in

that this isn't a group of people who are unionized. This is

not a group of people who are organized, and so this is if we can

manage to use the technology to push production into a less politically

organized group, then hell yeah, let's do that. And so I think

that that's the kind of concern that Cory has, to be honest,

it's one that I share. That's just not what this book is about.This

book is about the moral issues. And I personally don't think

that one has to choose between thinking about those two things.

And I guess I've been around long enough that I've seen confident

claims that this is a distraction from the real fight,

turn out not to age very well. I remember during the Campaign for

Nuclear Disarmament, which I marched in lots of rallies in Britain

campaigning for nuclear disarmament, people would be talking

about climate change, which back then we call global warming,

and would be shouted down. It's like, that's ludicrous. Why

are you worrying about the weather? You know, we could all be

dying in a nuclear war. Or when people started talking about

the rights of non human animals. My God, why are you talking

about dogs and cats when there are people, etc., etc. You know the

argument, right? Which is a familiar one. You may not be worried

about this thing because there are more important things to be worried

about. And I just personally have seen people be wrong often enough

that I am now have a little bit less confidence in my ability

to pick winners in terms of what's going to look in the future

like it was a really good allocation of my moral energies.

Let me just tack this on. During this past election, I mean,

for the last year, our organization fought to bring about

awareness of the slaughter of the Palestinian people. Watching

estimates of 40,000 children killed in Palestine and Gaza and,

you know, bringing that up. And I'm not going to mention the

name because I'd probably get in trouble at Thanksgiving. But individuals

that are Democrats. So why are you worried about that? Our family's

here in this country, what are you worried about that for? I need

to know that I'm not going to lose more rights for my daughter.

So I don't really care. And hearing that was almost like nails

down a chalkboard to me. That line of reasoning did not work for

me at all. And I'm hearing you as you're going through this. And

I'm saying to myself, you know what? There is room to walk and chew

gum. There is room to do that. So I really value that. Listen, folks,

the book we're talking about is The Line: Artificial Intelligence

and the Future of Personhood with my guest, James Boyle. James,

I'd like to thank you first of all for joining me today. I know

we're running up against time, but I'm going to give you one last

offer to make your final point. Is there anything that we

didn't cover today that you would like our listeners to take

out of this, aside from buying your wonderful book?

Well, funnily enough, I'm going to argue against interest and

tell your listeners, who may have much better things to do with

their money, that if they don't want to buy the book and they're

willing to read it electronically, I wanted this book

to be under a Creative Commons license, to be open access, and so

that anyone in the world would be able to download it and read it

for free. Because I think the moral warrant for access to knowledge

is not a wallet, it's a pulse. And that's something that's guided

me all through my time as being a scholar. It may seem sort

of an abstract or pompous way of putting it, but I believe it very

deeply. And so basically, everything I write, everything I

create, whether it's books like this or comic books about the

history of musical borrowing, they're all under Creative Commons

licenses and people can download them for free. So if you

can buy it, please do so. MIT was kind enough to let me use a Creative

Commons license, but if you don't have the dough, then just download

it and the book's on me. I hope you enjoy it.

Fantastic. Thank you so much, James. And it was nice to get to

know you prior to the interview here a little bit, and

I hope we can have you back on. There's so much more I know that

you bring to the table that I think our listeners would really

enjoy.

Well, thank you, Steve. I very much enjoyed chatting to you, and

I hope you have a wonderful day.

You as well. All right, folks, my name is Steve Grumbine with my

guest, James Boyle. Macro N Cheese is a podcast that's a part

of the Real Progressives nonprofit organization. We are a

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on behalf of my guests, James Boyle and Macro N Cheese. My name's

Steve Grumbine, and we are out of here.