The Full Rights Dilemma for A.I. Systems of Debatable Personhood

Abstract: An Artificially Intelligent system (an AI) has debatable personhood if it's epistemically possible either that the AI is a person or that it falls far short of personhood. Debatable personhood is a likely outcome of AI development and might arise soon. Debatable AI personhood throws us into a catastrophic moral dilemma: Either treat the systems as moral persons and risk sacrificing real human interests for the sake of entities without interests worth the sacrifice, or don't treat the systems as moral persons and risk perpetrating grievous moral wrongs against them. The moral issues become even more perplexing if we consider cases of possibly conscious AI that are subhuman, superhuman, or highly divergent from us in their morally relevant properties. We might soon build artificially intelligent entities - AIs - of debatable personhood. Our systems and habits of ethical thinking are currently as unprepared for this decision as medieval physics was for space flight.