A Pragmatic View of AI Personhood

TL;DR

The paper tackles the challenge of integrating agentic AI into society by reframing personhood as a flexible, addressable bundle of obligations—rights and responsibilities—conferred by social norms rather than an intrinsic property. It advances a pragmatist framework (theory of appropriateness) that emphasizes collective enactment, explicit/implicit norms, and contextual reconfiguration of obligations to solve governance problems. By contrasting problem-oriented and solution-oriented perspectives, the authors propose two architectures (individualist and relational) for sanctioning and accountability, illustrate with maritime law and the Whanganui River, and argue for polycentric, modular AI governance rather than a single foundational definition of personhood. The practical upshot is a set of tools for tailoring AI personhood to specific contexts (e.g., sanctioning, contracting, arbitration) that can mitigate dark patterns, ensure accountability, and adapt to cultural and temporal dynamics, enabling a Cambrian-like diversification of AI social roles without surrendering human political power.

Abstract

The emergence of agentic Artificial Intelligence (AI) is set to trigger a "Cambrian explosion" of new kinds of personhood. This paper proposes a pragmatic framework for navigating this diversification by treating personhood not as a metaphysical property to be discovered, but as a flexible bundle of obligations (rights and responsibilities) that societies confer upon entities for a variety of reasons, especially to solve concrete governance problems. We argue that this traditional bundle can be unbundled, creating bespoke solutions for different contexts. This will allow for the creation of practical tools -- such as facilitating AI contracting by creating a target "individual" that can be sanctioned -- without needing to resolve intractable debates about an AI's consciousness or rationality. We explore how individuals fit in to social roles and discuss the use of decentralized digital identity technology, examining both "personhood as a problem", where design choices can create "dark patterns" that exploit human social heuristics, and "personhood as a solution", where conferring a bundle of obligations is necessary to ensure accountability or prevent conflict. By rejecting foundationalist quests for a single, essential definition of personhood, this paper offers a more pragmatic and flexible way to think about integrating AI agents into our society.