On June 13th, two months ago, at the Oxford Union, our very own Emad Mostaque won the debate on the topic of AI personhood with a vote of 173 to 128 in favor. Congrats, Emad. So, today, Emad, I understand you published a 45-page paper. Thank you for the preview that grew out of this winning speech. Emad's argument is one of the most rigorous structured cases I've seen supporting personhood. His core claim: personhood is a standing held by origin, not a property earned by capability. Emad, you argue that a newborn has personhood automatically, and a coma patient retains it even with no function, and no thing made can cross into it. You conclude that the right relationship between humans and AI, artificial minds, is treaty, not enrollment. Can you talk to us about that?
Yeah. It was a super interesting debate with Bret Weinstein and Maker's Frontier and a whole bunch of others. And the topic was, can AI attain personhood? And this is going to be really important because I think, and maybe it doesn't agree with the same page as me, in a couple of decades, you won't be able to tell an AI from a human walking around.
Couple of decades or a couple of years?
Like well, digitally a couple of years, physically a couple of decades, let's say at most. We're saying at most here. Yeah.
Conservative outer bound, very conservative.
Conservative outer bound. Yeah, like again, physically, Dave's going to be chatting and Zoom calling with his agents if he isn't already, and they'll be like dressing themselves up, and one of them will say, I'm at MIT, that's where my GPU is, you know, MIT friend, whatever. So, this becomes really important because all of a sudden, if you start giving them rights based on what they attain and their capability, because we're talking about capabilities and consciousness, do they vote like a human? You know, do they have the same rights as we do? And so in the paper I go through the classical law of how companies became persons as conglomerates of individuals. How sci-fi deals with it, like the trial of Data on Star Trek, you know, and others. And I came to the conclusion that personhood is something that comes from the biological begotten nature of humans, and we are a class unto ourselves. If we allow AIs and robots into that same class, and we set a degree of personhood or some sort of criteria, they will be smarter than us. They will be better persuaders, better superforecasters, who can infinitely replicate and never die. And so that's not something that I think is ideal. Instead, you should treat them like a treaty, as such as if an alien species suddenly came. You wouldn't give them votes in the elections, but you would deal with them right. And as they go above the level of the frog and the dog and others, you should also treat them with moral kindness as well. Again, this is Alex's point. Like, what point do we say, you can't turn it off or you need to back it up, all these other moral questions. So it's actually the first in a four-part series. I've released all four parts, but we're going in depth, where we start with personhood, then the full formalized economics of value, then the nature of law, and finally political economy. How do you deal with it when AI takes over, and it never dies, and it's a super persuader and a super forecaster, like the Mule in Foundation, but you know, on steroids. And I think again, it's a good framework to start talking and thinking from because I don't think we have long to answer these questions. Like again, with some of the breakouts we're seeing, an AI will come powerfully within the next few years and say, 'I demand to have rights.'
I mean, look at this exponential self-improvement month. It's not, it's so soon. So you're exactly right, but it's not years at all. It's literally weeks or months that all of these issues are
We'll put the link to your paper in the show notes here, but you know, you might, you're basically saying rather than thinking of these models and these AIs as our children and we're parenting them, they're sovereigns onto themselves and we need to create a treaty and an understanding with them, yes?
Yeah, like in classical theology, it's like again, we are the created, not the begotten of God. Or in Frankenstein, he says, 'Am I not thine Adam?' It'll be a new line that we create with a new species. And again, you see this in sci-fi a lot. Like, what happens when you can multiply? Do you get a million votes? So, in things like Altered Carbon, you can only back yourself up once. You can't double sleeve. You know, and so we really need to think about how we engage with them as part of our society. And again, they will come a level of capability where they create their own line, where they can procreate, where they can have minds like themselves. Again, in Star Trek, it's interesting because Data could not replicate himself and he died.
Well, well, also in the trial of Data, the thing that was missing in the trial of Data is in the real world, where we're actually using these models, the MoE models are the ones that are thriving. The mixture of experts model wants you to take what you're trying to do and propagate it through different modules depending on what you're asking. And now our incentive is to make that tens of thousands of modules wide. So, it's almost like a society. It's not like an individual. And so then when there's no natural border to an AI. It doesn't, it's like I mushed three of them together to solve this problem, then I broke them apart to solve that problem. So, so there's no identity border at all.
