Post #4362835
2026-08-03 08:35 UTC
Almost every debate I get into about AI turns out to be an unjustified, unacknowledged conflation of two things that seem similar, but have profoundly different underlying characteristics. Take this argument: "Every time we extend rights to the nonhuman world - watersheds, endangered animals, ecosystems - the world gets better. Let's extend rights to AI - whether or not we think it's a 'person' and so reap those benefits."
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Replies (1)
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@pluralistic@mamot.fr 2026-08-03 08:35
This, too, is a coin trick. Extending rights to *nature* reliably makes the world better, but extending rights to *constructs* makes the world *far* worse (Exhibit A is corporate personhood) (obviously). A few moments' thought reveals the difference. If we extend rights to a watershed, that might result in an AI data-center being killed. If we extend rights to AI, that might lead to sacrificing the watershed to cool the data-center: https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/10/posthuman-as-in-no-humans/#hell-is-other-people 19/