NORTH CAROLINA LAW REVIEW Volume 70 | Number 4 Article 4 4-1-1992 Legal Personhood for Artificial Intelligences Lawrence B. Solum Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarship.law.unc.edu/nclr Part of the Law Commons Recommended Citation Lawrence B. Solum, Legal Personhood for Artificial Intelligences, 70 N.C. L. Rev. 1231 (1992). Available at: http://scholarship.law.unc.edu/nclr/vol70/iss4/4 This Comments is brought to you for free and open access by Carolina Law Scholarship Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in North Carolina Law Review by an authorized administrator of Carolina Law Scholarship Repository. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. ESSAY LEGAL PERSONHOOD FOR ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCES LAWRENCE B. SOLUM* Could an artificial intelligence become a legal person? As of today, this question is only theoretical. No existing computer program cur- rently possesses the sort of capacities that would justify serious judicial inquiry into the question of legal personhood. The question is nonethe- less of some interest. Cognitive science begins with the assumption that the nature of human intelligence is computational, and therefore, that the human mind can, in principle, be modelled as a program that runs on a computer.' Artificial intelligence (Al) research attempts to develop such models.2 But even as cognitive science, has displaced behavioralism as * Professor of Law and William M. Rains Fellow, Loyola Law School, Loyola Mary- mount University. B.A. 1981, University of California at Los Angeles; J.D: 1984, Harvard Law School. I owe thanks to Scott Altman, Ken Anderson, Don Brosnan, Don Crenshaw, Zlatan Damnjanovic, Michael Fitts, Kent Greenawalt, Sharon Lloyd, Shelley Marks, David Milon, Elyn Saks, and Paul Weithman for comments made on earlier versions of this essay.