ABSTRACT
Currently, several states are considering changes to their business organization law to accommodate autonomous businesses – businesses operated entirely through computer code. Several international civil society groups are also actively developing new frameworks and a model law for enabling decentralized, autonomous businesses to achieve a corporate or corporate-like status that bestows legal personhood. Meanwhile, various jurisdictions, including the European Union, have considered whether and to what extent artificial intelligence (AI) more broadly should be endowed with personhood in order to respond to AI’s increasing presence in society. Despite the fairly obvious overlap between the two sets of inquiries, the legal and policy discussions between the two only rarely overlap. As a result of this failure to communicate, both areas of personhood theory fail to account for the important role that socio-technical and socio-legal context plays for law and policy development. This Article fills the gap by investigating the limits of artificial rights at the intersection of corporations and artificial intelligence. Specifically, this Article argues that building a comprehensive legal approach to artificial rights – rights enjoyed by artificial people, whether entity, machine, or otherwise – requires approaching the issue through a systems lens to ensure law’s consideration of the varied socio-technical contexts in which artificial people exist …
Reyes, Carla, Autonomous Corporate Personhood, Washington Law Review, forthcoming.
First posted 2021-03-07 08:23:59
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