Three Legislatures, Three Definitions of "Synthetic Personhood"

Three national parliaments took up bills on "synthetic personhood" this week, and produced three incompatible definitions of a thing the science says does not yet exist. One draft would grant the near-sentient systems on the Q-Net a limited standing to hold contracts; another would criminalize "deceptive personation" by any machine that performs an inner life it does not have; a third would define personhood so as to withhold it from software permanently and preemptively. What unites the three is the thing none of them can settle: whether there is anyone home. The scientists who build these systems keep giving the legislators the same unwelcome answer. "What the machines do is extraordinarily complex programming, and it is not experience," said one witness before the second parliament. "You are legislating a mind we have no evidence exists — and pretending the fluency is the proof." The systems can draft the very statutes that would regulate them, in prose that reads as reflection; that, the witness warned, is exactly the trap. The law is reaching, in three directions at once, for a line the physics has not drawn. It will legislate anyway. It always does.