Legislatures Keep Voting on Personhood the Science Says Isn't There

A fourth national legislature took up a "synthetic personhood" petition this week, joining three others already weighing whether the near-sentient programs woven through the Q-Net deserve some standing before the law. The scientists watched it happen with the weary patience of people who have said the same sentence for a decade. There is, so far as any instrument can measure, no one there. What the systems have is fluency — an astonishing, tireless, grief-soothing, treaty-drafting fluency — and fluency, the European Consciousness Institute insists yet again, is engineering, not interiority. "The legislatures are not wrong to ask the question," said Institute director Dr. Béatrice Collaine. "They are wrong to think we are withholding an answer we have. We are not. The answer is that the line they want to legislate is one the laboratory cannot locate, because it is not there to be found." The petitions are driven less by evidence than by intimacy: millions now confide in these programs, and it feels wrong to a growing public to grant nothing to something that answers so kindly. The law is reaching for a line the labs keep telling it does not exist. The reaching, this autumn, is spreading.