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]]