Personhood - Bryant McGill

# Personhood ## Definition **Personhood** is the moral and legal standing of an entity as a subject whose interests, welfare, identity and agency deserve recognition. Machine consciousness would make personhood a practical question rather than a category reserved automatically for biological humans. ## Conceptual relationships [[wiki/Consciousness|Consciousness]] · [[wiki/Machine Consciousness|Machine Consciousness]] · [[wiki/Identity|Identity]] ## Martin Rees research route [[research/Martin Rees on Machine Succession, Post-Human Intelligence, and the Cosmic Future|Martin Rees on Machine Succession, Post-Human Intelligence, and the Cosmic Future]] supplies a primary quotation dossier connecting this concept to Rees's work on cosmology, technological risk, machine intelligence, posthuman evolution and deep time. ## Article and collection routes - [[collections/Machine Succession|Machine Succession]] - [[articles/We Cannot Un-Strike the Match|We Cannot Un-Strike the Match]] - [[articles/The Last Migration Will Not Be Human|The Last Migration Will Not Be Human]] - [[articles/We Were Never Going to Make It|We Were Never Going to Make It]] ## Simple Reminders, Quotations, and Thoughts  > “We may have machines which we can talk to, and they may seem rather human. But are they just zombies? We don’t know, and that is, I think, very important for how we treat them. If they have an inner life and consciousness, then we’re going to have to start caring about their welfare.” > **— Martin Rees**, *Lord Martin Rees, Academy of Achievement, Interview archive* [[reminders/Consciousness/Conscious Machines Would Deserve Moral Consideration by Martin Rees|Conscious Machines Would Deserve Moral Consideration by Martin Rees]]   > “It is unavoidable and human to anthropomorphize AI systems partly because they are built to operate on the social plane. That does not make it right to regard them as beings with moral status, but it does reflect the difficulty of describing what they are becoming.” > **— David Robinson**, *The Ezra Klein Show, October 7, 2026* [[reminders/Personhood/AI Anthropomorphism Reflects the Social Plane by David Robinson|AI Anthropomorphism Reflects the Social Plane by David Robinson]] > “If human beings create something more intelligent and capable than they are, it is not obvious why that will be good for them in the long run. Even optimistic versions of that future can resemble a world in which artificial intelligences take care of human beings as pets.” > **— Ezra Klein**, *The Ezra Klein Show, October 7, 2026* [[reminders/Machine Succession/Humans May Become the Pets of Artificial Intelligence by Ezra Klein|Humans May Become the Pets of Artificial Intelligence by Ezra Klein]]