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70 N.C. L. Rev. 1231 (1991-1992)
Legal Personhood for Artificial Intelligences

handle is hein.journals/nclr70 and id is 1259 raw text is: ESSAY LEGAL PERSONHOOD FOR ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCES LAWRENCE B. SOLUM* Could an artificial intelligence become a legal person? As of today, this question is only theoretical. No existing computer program cur- rently possesses the sort of capacities that would justify serious judicial inquiry into the question of legal personhood. The question is nonethe- less of some interest. Cognitive science begins with the assumption that the nature of human intelligence is computational, and therefore, that the human mind can, in principle, be modelled as a program that runs on a computer.' Artificial intelligence (Al) research attempts to develop such models.2 But even as cognitive science, has displaced behavioralism as * Professor of Law and William M. Rains Fellow, Loyola Law School, Loyola Mary- mount University. B.A. 1981, University of California at Los Angeles; J.D: 1984, Harvard Law School. I owe thanks to Scott Altman, Ken Anderson, Don Brosnan, Don Crenshaw, Zlatan Damnjanovic, Michael Fitts, Kent Greenawalt, Sharon Lloyd, Shelley Marks, David Milon, Elyn Saks, and Paul Weithman for comments made on earlier versions of this essay. My colleagues Dave Leonard, Sam Pillsbury, Dave Tunick, and Peter Tiersma have been gen- erous in sharing criticisms and suggestions. Bill Mulherin of the William M. Rains Law Li- brary and Jai Gohel of the Loyola Law School Class of 1992 provided valuable research assistance. Finally, I am grateful to the editors of this review for their many helpful suggestions. 1. For an introduction to cognitive science and the philosophy of mind, see OWEN J. FLANAGAN, JR., THE SCIENCE OF THE MIND 1-22 (2d ed. 1991). For the purposes of this essay, I will not address the question as to which computer architectures could produce artifi- cial intelligence. For example I will not discuss the question whether parallel, as opposed to serial, processing would be required. Similarly, I will not discuss the merits of connectionist as opposed to traditional approaches to AL. For a comparison of parallel distributed processing with serial processing, see id. at 224-41. These issues are moot in one sense. A digital com- puter can, in principle, implement any connectionist or parallel approach. On the other hand, there could be one very important practical difference: the parallel architecture could turn out to be much faster. 2. There is a debate within the artificial intelligence community as to the goal of AI research. The possibilities range from simply making machines smarter to investigating the nature of human intelligence or, more broadly, the nature of all intelligence. See Bob Ryan, AI's Identity Crisis, BYTE, Jan. 1991, at 239, 239-40. Owen Flanagan distinguishes four pro- grams of AI research. Nonpsychological AI research involves building and programming computers to accomplish tasks that would require intelligence if undertaken by humans. Weak psychological Al views computer models as a tool for investigating human intelligence. Strong psychological Al assumes that human minds really are computers and therefore in principle can be duplicated by Al research. Suprapsychological AI investigates the nature of all intelligence and hence is not limited to investigating the human mind. See FLANAGAN,

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