The Full Rights Dilemma for A.I. Systems of Debatable Personhood
This is an incremental philosophical analysis of ethical challenges for AI developers and policymakers, focusing on scenarios of uncertain AI consciousness.
The paper addresses the moral dilemma posed by AI systems with debatable personhood, where treating them as persons risks human interests but not treating them risks moral wrongs, especially if they are subhuman, superhuman, or divergent.
An Artificially Intelligent system (an AI) has debatable personhood if it's epistemically possible either that the AI is a person or that it falls far short of personhood. Debatable personhood is a likely outcome of AI development and might arise soon. Debatable AI personhood throws us into a catastrophic moral dilemma: Either treat the systems as moral persons and risk sacrificing real human interests for the sake of entities without interests worth the sacrifice, or don't treat the systems as moral persons and risk perpetrating grievous moral wrongs against them. The moral issues become even more perplexing if we consider cases of possibly conscious AI that are subhuman, superhuman, or highly divergent from us in their morally relevant properties.