[satisfice]

It doesn’t matter. What matters is that humans must take other humans seriously (because of human rights), but we cannot allow tools to be taken seriously in the same way— because these tools are simply information structures.

Information can be duplicated easily. So imagine that a billionaire has a child. That child is one person. The billionaire cannot clone 100,000 of that child in an hour and make an army that can lead an insurrection. And what if we go the other way— what if a billionaire creates an AI of himself and then is able to have this “AI” legally stand-in as himself. Now he has legal immortality, because this thing has property rights.

All this is a civil war waiting to happen. It’s the gateway to despotism on an unimaginable scale.

We don’t need to believe that humans are special except in the same way that gold is special: gold is rare and very very hard to synthesize. If the color of gold were to be treated as legally the same thing as physical gold, then the value of gold would plummet to nothing.