The Line

AI and the Future of Personhood

James Boyle

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Hardback

Forthcoming
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English

MIT Press
07 January 2025

Science: general issues

How AI will challenge our ideas about personhood.

How AI will challenge our ideas about personhood.

Chatbots like ChatGPT have challenged human exceptionalism- we are no longer the only beings capable of generating language and ideas fluently. But is ChatGPT conscious? Or is it merely engaging in sophisticated mimicry? And what happens in the future if the claims to consciousness are more credible? In The Line, James Boyle explores what these changes might do to our concept of personhood, to ""the line"" we believe separates our species from the rest of the world, but also separates ""persons"" with legal rights from objects.

The personhood wars-over the rights of corporations, animals, over the question of when life begins and ends-have always been contentious. We've even denied the personhood of members of our own species. How will those old fights affect the new ones, and vice versa? Boyle pursues those questions across a dizzying array of fields. He discusses moral philosophy and science fiction, transgenic species, nonhuman animals, the surprising history of corporate personality, and AI itself. Engaging with empathy and anthropomorphism, courtroom battles on behalf of chimps, and doom-laden projections about the threat of AI, The Line offers fascinating and thoughtful answers to questions about our future that are arriving sooner than we think.

By: James Boyle
Imprint: MIT Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 178mm, Width: 114mm,
Weight: 567g
ISBN: 9780262049160
ISBN 10: 0262049163
Pages: 336
Publication Date: 07 January 2025
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

Introduction 1 Slaves, Skin-Jobs and Artificial Sheep 2 Artificial Intelligence 3 Corporations 4 Non-Human Animals 5 Transgenic Entitites, Chimeras and Hybrids 6 Conclusion Acknowledgments Notes Index

James Boyle is the William Neal Reynolds Professor of Law at Duke Law School, the founder of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain, and former Chair of Creative Commons. He is the author of The Public Domain and Shamans, Software and Spleens, the coauthor of two comic books, and the winner of the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Pioneer Award for his work on digital civil liberties.