Dr David Lawrence and Dr Sarah Morley have been awarded £29,925 by the Wellcome Trust to explore company law and the emergence of novel beings.
The project first seeks to develop practical legal definitions for the status of both conscious and unconscious novel beings, in service of later developing and providing proposals for appropriate regulation for the responsible development, operation, and disposal of new morally significant technologies by corporations.
One forthcoming challenge for policy and regulation is the potential emergence of new types of being, both sapient and not, through advances in both synthetic genome technologies and the development of artificial intelligences (AI). It seems likely that these technologies will be the product of public companies and in particular multinational corporations.
The main source of regulation for these bodies derives from company law; and we have to decide whether the beings they produce should be accorded legal personality. How we answer this question will inform how heavily corporations should be involved in the development and application of these technologies.
This poses the question as to whether company law can, or should, be the primary means of regulating these novel beings, and by extension their potential wide-ranging societal impacts. This is not merely speculative; draft European Parliament legislation including electronic corporate personhood for AI systems has already been proposed.
Our proposed research will include establishing a network to consider these future technological developments and suggest practical legal definitions for the status of both conscious and unconscious novel beings, in service of later developing and providing proposals for appropriate regulation for the responsible development, operation, and disposal of the technologies.
Avengers #58, "Even an Android can Cry" by Roy Thomas and John Buscema (drawn by John Buscema)
Biotechnology and advances in AI promise the advent of new forms of life, maybe even 'conscious', reasoning creatures as intelligent and as sapient as Homo sapiens. It seems likely that these products will be created by public companies and in particular multinational corporations. At present no regulation exists which addresses the responsibility of companies in the development, operation, and disposal of these technologies. This symposium seeks to ask how we approach regulation for companies producing and possessing conscious technology.
One forthcoming challenge for policy and regulation is the potential emergence of new types of being, both sapient and not, through advances in germline gene editing, synthetic genome technologies and the development of artificial intelligences (AI). Recent proposals by committees of the European Parliament, the White House, and the House of Commons have suggested among other things the institution of degrees of personhood for extant ‘expert systems’ and autonomous robots. These proposals fail in several regards including quite how we might identify an intelligence deserving of this status.
Firstly, the granting of electronic personhood as they propose does not go far enough- corporate persons as they presently exist are a creation of commercial convenience and in no way possess any kind of ‘human’ or moral qualities. In certain circumstances and with particular technologies this may be an appropriate approach, however emerging bio- and cyber- technologies may occasion rights more akin to those of natural persons.
Secondly, regulators have reacted in a piecemeal fashion. It is imperative to first identify categories of morally significant products that would be subject to regulation and to what extent positive or negative rights might apply. We may never solve the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness, but this does not negate the need to address the practical issues subsidiary to it. We must therefore develop legal boundaries that might be used to determine between these products – a distinction which the authors term conscious and non-conscious beings.
This too may be overly simplistic a division. Not only are there degrees within consciousness of both sentience and sapience, there is the important point that consciousness does not equal competence (Gillick v West Norfolk). The technologies in question may have similar cognitive capacity to a human, but much in the way that children are not seen as competent to give consent to medical procedures it does not follow that a conscious synthetic being would be cognitively equal to an adult. Incorporating subtleties such as this into the development of definitions will help us assess the extent to which a given technology should be liable under or protected by the law.
The meeting will highlight the difficulties in this interplay between consciousness, responsibility, and liability, and attempt to provide a basis for developing workable legal definitions that may be applicable in many fields of law: including medical, company, human rights, employment, criminal and tort, amongst others. This goes far beyond the existing regulatory proposals and academic literature in seeking to move the focus from reacting to piecemeal issues (albeit important, such as negligence and automated cars) onto a more holistic and broad approach. Thus we ensure our readiness to keep pace with technologies that develop ever faster.
This meeting, a roundtable discussion between the project leads, advisory panel, and other leading experts in the intersecting fields, aimed to identify and explore the high-level issues surrounding our core thesis. Topics ranged from the foundations of human morality and rights, coding of ethical responses into AI, the responsibilities of companies in developing moral products, moral decision making in AI, the differences and similarities of developing regulation for synthetic biology and genomic technologies, and the means by which all these issues might be incorporated into regulation and implemented. Furthermore, the meeting served as the foundation of a unique and fascinating network of academics working at an entirely new intersection of work.
As expected, the meeting confirmed that this new field has incredibly broad potential, and will form the basis for decades of work.
