AI, Persons, Free Will, and a Policy Recommendation

This essay examines whether artificial intelligence (AI) could ever qualify as persons entitled to the same rights and responsibilities as human persons. The discussion engages two classic contributions to the philosophy of mind: William Lycan's argument that a suitably programmed machine could possess mentality and free will, and John Searle's Chinese Room argument, which casts doubt on the claim that syntactic symbol manipulation alone can generate genuine understanding or intentionality. The author concurs with Lycan that a properly programmed AI could, in principle, possess free will, but advances a distinct account of this possibility grounded in an event-causal libertarian theory of free will. The author argues that he and Robert Kane have both advanced theories of libertarian free will that could allow a properly programmed AI to possess free will. Nevertheless, the author contends that Searle's critique furnishes substantial grounds for skepticism regarding the personhood of any future AI, since genuine understanding and first-person intentionality may not be realizable in computational systems. Given this residual uncertainty, and given the profound moral and legal implications that would follow from granting personhood to AI, the essay proposes a precautionary policy recommendation: we should refrain from creating AI systems that, for all we know, may or may not be persons. The argument thus integrates metaphysical analysis of free will and personhood with applied ethical and policy considerations, offering a framework for responsible development of increasingly sophisticated artificial agents.

کلیدواژه ها:

artificial intelligence ، Personhood ، free will ، libertarianism ، Moral status ، AI policy