My new book, The Line: AI and the Future of Personhood, will be published by MIT Press on Oct 22 2024. It is under a CC:BY:NC:SA license so you can read, copy, or adapt it for free, so long as you do non-commercially and with attribution. You can also buy it at any bookstore or on Amazon.
Chatbots like ChatGPT have challenged human exceptionalism: we are no longer the only beings capable of generating language and ideas fluently. Chatbots are not conscious. But what happens in the future if the claims to consciousness are more credible? In The Line, James Boyle explores what these changes might do to our concept of personhood, to “the line” we believe separates our species from the rest of the world, but also separates “persons” with legal rights from objects.
The personhood wars—over the rights of corporations, animals, over the question of when life begins and ends—have always been contentious. We’ve even denied the personhood of members of our own species. How will those old fights affect the new ones, and vice versa? Boyle pursues those questions across a dizzying array of fields. He discusses moral philosophy and science fiction, transgenic species, nonhuman animals, the surprising history of corporate personality, and AI itself. Engaging with empathy and anthropomorphism, courtroom battles on behalf of chimps, and doom-laden projections about the threat of AI, The Line offers fascinating and thoughtful answers to questions about our future that are arriving sooner than we think. To sneak a peak at the first two chapters, click here.
Praise for The Line
“James Boyle has always seen through the technology, to the values we must hold as humans. That gift is just what understanding the emerging technologies of AI will require, and what this book gives. Beautifully clear, intellectually compelling, this book is the best way of thinking through the line that divides us from it, or them. Can we hold the line? Should we? Much depends on the answers.” Larry Lessig, Harvard Law School
“Deeply thoughtful and witty as hell, Boyle’s exploration of the ‘line’ is an absolute must-read in our budding era of machine intelligence.” – Kate Darling, research scientist, MIT; author of The New Breed
“Are technologically created artifacts things or persons? In this brutally honest and timely book, James Boyle demonstrates how questions that had once been considered science fiction are now a very real and urgent matter.” – David J. Gunkel, Northern Illinois University; author of The Machine Question, Robot Rights, and Person, Thing, Robot
James Boyle is the William Neal Reynolds Professor of Law at Duke Law School, founder of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain, and former Chair of Creative Commons. He is the author of The Public Domain and Shamans, Software, and Spleens, the coauthor of two comic books, and the winner of the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Pioneer Award for his work on digital civil liberties.
More praise for The Line:
“James Boyle has been thinking about artificial intelligence and personhood for as long as anyone in the academy. The Line is a must-read—the culmination of Boyle’s meticulous research and characteristically insightful analysis on a critical issue of our time.” – Ryan Calo, Lane Powell and D. Wayne Gittinger Professor of Law, University of Washington; cofounder, We, Robot.
For more information, please contact Katie Lewis, The MIT Press | lewisk@mit.edu