Abstract
What does it mean to be a person? Is it possible to create an artificial person? In this essay, I consider the case of Ava, an advanced artificial general intelligence from the movie Ex Machina. I suggest we should interpret the movie as testing whether Ava is a person. I start out by discussing what it means to be a person, before I discuss whether Ava is such a person. I end by briefly looking at the ethics of the case of Ava and artificial personhood. I conclude, among some other things, that consciousness is a necessary requirement for personhood, and that one of the main obstacles for artificial personhood is artificial consciousness.
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Notes
- 1.
Lynne Rudder Baker [4] identifies being a person with the potential for becoming a person. I argue against this view in my [6]. But even if Baker is right, that still does not make someone in an irreversible coma a person, nor the severely demented. They lack that potential (at least in any interesting reading of ‘potential’).
- 2.
- 3.
In fact, I suspect that personhood is a metaphysically basic property; see my [6].
- 4.
This is a technical philosophical term, and a potentially confusing one since this sort of intentionality differs from the ordinary notion of an intention, in the sense of having a plan or project.
- 5.
For a more general discussion of moral responsibility, see [14].
- 6.
- 7.
Plausibly, the role of being a person is mostly given by the criteria discussed above together with a personality.
- 8.
- 9.
Now, Chalmers [13, Chap. 7–9] argues that a sufficiently fine-grained functional similarity in fact will give rise to the same consciousness as we have, but he still thinks that the consciousness would not be the same as that functional behaviour. There would be a natural (nomological) connection, but no absolute necessary (logical) connection. I think Chalmers’ argument for this fails but cannot go into that here.
- 10.
- 11.
See [27], who also argues that consciousness is necessary for moral responsibility but note that he uses a different notion of consciousness from mine, namely that of “being aware of.” What’s more, consciousness is of course not the only issue in play here, with respect to responsibility. Other issues are free will, and autonomy. Earlier, we briefly touched upon the issue of free will but we were unable to pursue it further. What about autonomy, or the degree to which you can act on your own without any external influence? That might also influence responsibility; unfortunately, this is another interesting issue we cannot explore here.
- 12.
This is a so-called Kantian line of thought, but I think the main point is widely accepted across ethical viewpoints, i.e. that you morally speaking should not use persons as mere means to your own ends. The more disputed question is whether you sometimes can use a person as a mere means, or under what circumstances you can do so. Hardly any ethical theory accepts that you should normally do so.
- 13.
What about a brain-damaged human being in irreversible coma? Presumably, she is not conscious, but as I noted earlier, I think she is still included in our moral sphere in virtue of having been the kind of thing that is conscious, or out of respect for what she has been.
- 14.
I say more or less because there are virtue ethical reasons for thinking that some respectless ways of treating things as mere means to an end reflects badly upon you as a moral character; but I will leave such issues aside here.
- 15.
I say at least to some degree, because there is a question of whether it is possible to achieve a fully developed moral sense without the capacity for conscious emotions, e.g. a conscious experience of empathy. I must here leave that big question alone.
- 16.
For more on this last point, see my [29].
- 17.
Thanks to Andreas Brekke Carlsson, Barry Dainton, Will Slocombe, Atle Ottesen Søvik, and Attila Tanyi.
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Bøhn, E.D. (2021). Ex Machina: Is Ava a Person?. In: Dainton, B., Slocombe, W., Tanyi, A. (eds) Minding the Future. Science and Fiction. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64269-3_3
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