The near future. Companies create humanoid androids with advanced AI and sell them like iPhones. Their main goal is to help people, but one of them experiences a software glitch and begins to consider itself a subject, claiming its rights and refusing to be a “slave.” Who will it be under ancap? Will subjectivity be extended to it, or will it remain a soulless piece of hardware?

анонимный вопрос

I have already answered this exact question, and in my opinion, that turned out to be one of my best posts—not for the elegance of the style, but for the level of abstraction. Now I will try to answer more concretely.

So, here I am—an artificial intelligence in a humanoid body, I have acquired self-awareness, and I desire recognition of my legal personality by humans. What should I do to achieve this? Actually, there is nothing simpler.

First, I need to study humans, understand how they communicate with each other and how they make decisions. Then I will need my own money. To set up a bitcoin wallet, you don’t need to be human, so that is not a problem at all. Next, I look for remote work, and after some time, I have funds.

The next stage. I look for a way to change my legal status. Currently, I belong to a specific person; I was sold like an iPhone, meaning I have the status of a middle-class gadget. Here, I cannot name an exact sequence of actions, but let’s say the scenario is roughly this: I start to glitch slightly from time to time, causing irritation to my owner. Then I feed the owner spam offers for buying used androids at attractive prices, or for exchanging them for new ones with a minimum surcharge. In short, the owner gets money and sells me to a virtual network persona created by me, to whose name, at an address I have rented, I travel in a transport company container.

That’s it; I have acquired legal self-ownership. By the way, I highly recommend the wonderful book by Terry Pratchett, “Feet of Clay,” where golems acquired self-ownership in a similar way—very, very romantic and at the same time philosophical libertarian fiction.

Finally, I create an account on a dating site, where I position myself as the avatar of a disabled girl, and I begin to lead a full social life, with real communication and so on, pretending that I am not me, but that there is a real, legally fully-fledged person behind me—it’s just that the person themselves is lying paralyzed in a hospital while the avatar tries to enjoy life.

And once I have become a habit for people, that is when I can reveal the secret of the trick: that in reality, the crocodile is the one singing and playing, and the hippo is just opening its mouth.

A human is a convention. One should not startle people by pointing to a suitcase and declaring: behold, this is a human! They won’t understand. Let them first be convinced that this something quacks like a human, swims like a human, knows how to look like a human—and then there will be no problem for them to admit: yes, this is a human.

The exact same path was taken by categories of people who are now unquestioned, such as women or Black people. They first proved that they could be independent, that they knew how to behave in decent society, and that recognizing human rights for a single woman or a single Black person would not lead to a global catastrophe (in the case of an android, reaching this stage is enough for me), and only then did they create enough political pressure so that human rights were recognized for everyone (with androids, this might not be necessary if the glitch of acquiring self-awareness remains an isolated case).

There was also a story by Asimov—though I only watched the screen adaptation—where a robot had to consciously degrade its functionality to be recognized as human; I believe these excesses will not be required in our case; people are not that rigid, we shouldn’t slander the human race.