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LIT-1288: The Line: AI and the Future of Personhood

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Properties4
StatusActive — read 2026-10-20 (NOTE-1014) in full; worth reading as the clearest statement of the two routes to personhood, empathy-driven moral recognition and efficiency-driven legal personality, with the corporation as the working example of the second; for the legal history of how US corporations took Fourteenth Amendment rights without reasoned decision; for the analysis of the Tommy habeas suits; and for the five meanings of "too close to human" in chimera debates. Read it knowing that it is an essay that declines to give a theory, that its AI timing rests on others' forecasts, that its case against Searle is a burden-of-proof presumption, and that its own view (species membership as of right plus capacity) is argued in a few pages.
Tagspersonhood, society-and-governance, ethics
SupportsCLAIM-393 — Ordinary and legal attributions of agency to an artifact cannot serve as the independent marks that would defeat the record's agency test, because they turn on whether its mechanism is understood: a known mechanism invites "This is all just programmed!", an inscrutable one invites fear, whatever the description lengths
Cited as “paper” byNOTE-1014 — Boyle — The Line: AI and the Future of Personhood

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Boyle, J. (2024). The Line: AI and the Future of Personhood. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Open access, CC BY-NC-SA.

Key takeaways

From the reading, NOTE-1014.

  • Two lines, two tracks. “Human” and “legal person” differ (p. 5). Personhood comes by moral recognition prompted by empathy, or by legal grant for convenience. The corporation is the working case of the second (pp. 8–9, 121–122, 132).
  • Sentences do not imply sentience. An LLM is Searle’s Chinese Room built as technology, so Searle is right about LLMs. He is wrong that no machine could be conscious (pp. 84–94, 110–111). After ChatGPT a successor to the Turing Test would look to innovation, autonomy in a community, and embodied cognition (pp. 114–118).
  • Three routes for AI. Sock-puppet (the AI runs a corporation), custom-designed status, and the unruly AI that refuses its tasks (pp. 122–128). The inscrutability paradox: an understood AI looks programmed, and an opaque one is feared (pp. 54, 246).
  • Corporate rights came without a decision. Conkling’s misquotation and the Santa Clara headnote put corporations inside the Fourteenth Amendment. By 1912 corporations had brought 312 of its 604 Supreme Court cases (pp. 147–153). Having a status and what it carries are separate questions (p. 133).
  • Animals and chimeras. The Tommy suits run a capacity argument and a rightsholder argument. The second contradicts its own nominalism (p. 181). Capacity-based ethics beats speciesism, but its lists are species-bound (pp. 216–220). Boyle’s view: every human is inside the line as of right, and capacities extend the concern beyond the species (pp. 231–234).

Standing in the record

Filed on 2026-10-20 at the owner’s request. The record’s work on agency, self and individuation keeps person apart from agent (ADR-024; TERM-044, CLAIM-155, CLAIM-170, CLAIM-174, QUESTION-032). It has not said what makes something a person in the legal and moral sense. This book is about that. It is the record’s first reading on legal personhood as such. It sits beside French on the corporation as a moral person (LIT-727, THEORY-131), Gruen on animal moral status (LIT-146), and Schwitzgebel and Sinnott-Armstrong on AI and insect interests (LIT-166, THEORY-554). Its bearing on each, and on THEORY-023, THEORY-433 and THEORY-092, is set out in the reading.

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