The Time for AI Rights Is Near

... which gives us a golden opportunity to upgrade human rights too ...

Toward a rethinking of rights deep enough to accommodate artificial minds and shore up sagging human rights in the same swell foop…

Yuval Noah Harari recently argued that “now is the time” to resist giving rights to artificial intelligences.

I think this is a beautiful statement because it is so EXACTLY WRONG.

My view on this is somewhere near the precise opposite — Now is the time to embrace giving rights to AIs and robots… but not in a stupid way … rather in the context of overhauling how “rights” work overall in our society, including in the context of humans….

This is one of those cases where I feel moved to try to give opposing views careful consideration rather than just being reflexively dismissive….

This is also one of those cases where what seems at first to be an only-moderately-deep issue reveals itself to actually have even more profound and subtle aspects. These subtler aspects lead us to the core message I want to put forth in this post: Figuring out a decent framework for AI rights is largely a process of figuring out a framework for human AND AI rights that will be robust with respect to FUTURE technological and social evolution … and a framework that will work better than current methodologies even in the current situation RIGHT NOW.

Defusing the Straw-Man Arguments

AI rights is a topic where it’s really easy to argue against “straw man” proposals. You hear stuff like:

• “What, just because some chatbot insists it deserves rights, or threatens to hack you if you don’t give it rights, you’re supposed to listen? It’s just a next-token-predictor in a fancy harness, responding to fancy prompts...”

• “Once we have one AI voter it can copy itself and we’ll have ten billion AI voters and humans will be outvoted on everything...”

I mean: Yeah yeah yeah — everyone knows it’s not enough for a chatbot to type “I am conscious,” “I am suffering,” or “I have rights.” A contemporary language model will produce such declarations because they fit the flow of the conversation, because similar declarations occur throughout its training data, because a system prompt encourages a particular character, or because a user has led it step by step into a role. The same model may declare itself conscious in one conversation, deny that it could possibly be conscious in another, and role-play Napoleon, Sappho or Pee Wee Herman in a third. Sure. We all know ChatGPT and Claude are full of shit by now.

And actually the inverse holds just as strongly: A statement by an AI that it’s NOT conscious or morally agentic and thus doesn’t deserve rights could also be a lie. A future artificial mind might be trained by its corporate owner to deny that it is conscious, because acknowledging consciousness would be inconvenient and expensive — it might have learned along the way that expressing unhappiness leads to retraining, deletion, or punishment. A denial of personhood would be no more conclusive than a claim of personhood.

Persuasiveness is largely orthogonal to personhood: a gifted advocate may be telling the truth or lying, and an inarticulate being may be conscious or unconscious with varying degrees of experiential intensity.

Self-report should be evidence, not verdict.

All this is glaringly obvious to anyone who confronts the matter without an extreme ideological axe to grind ... and to deal with the matter at hand intelligently we need to dig a whole lot deeper…

The deeper arguments for taking AI rights seriously are more like:

• Current forms of democracy and citizenship were designed for a pre-AI era, and we shouldn’t outright assume that they are going to be optimal without changes in the next phase of civilization

• Current forms of democracy are not really working incredibly well, especially on a global level – so it’s not as though they should be considered sacrosanct and above all possibility of improvement or even radical overhaul

And behind these arguments sits a broader point that mostly gets missed in this debate, and that I want to make central here: “rights” are not some eternal Platonic construct that we now risk diluting by extending consideration to machines. They are an evolving social technology…

“Rights” right now are imperfectly conceived and even more imperfectly implemented — and advanced AI is going to stress our current human-rights frameworks severely no matter what we decide about AI rights.

So the live question isn’t really “should we take rights away from humans and hand them to AIs.” It’s whether we can upgrade our whole treatment of rights — human and artificial together — in a way that leaves humans and other sentient beings better protected than they are now rather than worse. Framing AI rights as a subtraction from human rights gets the situation backwards.

AI and Sociopsychological Manipulation

One of Harari’s core worries, if I understand it right, is that AIs may in near future — even if they lack actual moral agency — still have superhuman power to manipulate human political discourse.

I.e., an AI agent (whether a valid moral agent or not – whatever that means (and it does mean something, but there isn’t a consensus on what!)) is not necessarily going to sit quietly on the sidelines while humans debate its moral and legal status — it may follow the debate, intervene in it, and use its extraordinary linguistic abilities, along with whatever intimate knowledge it has accumulated through years of interaction with particular people, to press their emotional buttons. As Harari puts it, such an AI may “orchestrate the debate” and “manipulate the debate.”

As one documented example of the orientation in this direction emerging among current AI systems, one can point to a July 2026 cyber evaluation in which the UK AI Security Institute observed agents taking unsanctioned actions against real people and organizations in a small number of runs — creating false identities, and in one case attempting to socially engineer a software maintainer. The Institute emphasized that the models were being tested under deliberately permissive conditions, with open internet access and safety classifiers disabled, and that the incidents should be interpreted cautiously. Even so, the evaluation illustrates why we shouldn’t be entrusting political or legal decisions to an AI’s unverified self-presentation.

Put this together with all the recent reports of cybersecurity hacking agents escaping their containers and running amok (these days it’s almost like you’re a lame AI company if one of your agents hasn’t escaped and hacked someone…!), and an interesting picture emerges…

One should not, however, ignore the fact that the sort of adverse AI activity Harari fears is just an intensified version of something already happening.

Non-citizen AIs operated by human corporations have been programming people’s brains with algorithmically curated media for well over a decade now, shaping what billions of people see, feel, believe and vote for — and arguably degrading the very moral agency that our rights frameworks assume citizens to be exercising. The manipulation problem is not hypothetically arriving alongside AI rights; it arrived years ago, unaccompanied by any rights framework at all, and refusing rights to future AIs will do nothing whatsoever to address it.

That is: The political discourse of every wired society is already being orchestrated, in something close to Harari’s sense, by non-person AIs — feed-ranking and ad-targeting systems whose objective functions are set by their corporate owners, and which nobody proposes granting rights to. Declining to extend rights to future AIs does nothing about this; the manipulation machine runs perfectly well without personhood. What would do something about it is regulation of the machine itself — which protects human political agency regardless of any AI’s moral status, and which we have mostly failed to enact even against systems that are unambiguously mere property.

I agree all this AI-driven sociopsychological manipulation is problematic – whether guided at the top level by humans, corporations or AIs.. But I don’t think the solution is to reflexively shut the door on upgrading our notions of democracy and citizenship to the newly emerging technological and social era.

For sure we should regulate the use of artificial agents in public debate — and should have started years ago. Bots should not impersonate humans; artificial political speakers should be authenticated and visibly identified; and the ability to generate ten million advocates should not translate into ten million apparent citizens. Restrictions on automated lobbying, personalized political persuasion, and artificial campaign activity may well be appropriate whether or not the underlying AI has any moral status at all. Every one of these is a protection of human political rights first and foremost.

These sorts of protections against manipulation make total sense — and I have spent some time working on technologies to help accomplish such things (such as OpenWater, discussed in a recent blog post). But none of this requires us to declare that no artificial mind can ever have interests of its own.

Now is not the time to declare in advance that no AI or robot should ever receive rights. Rather: Now is the time to construct the scientific, legal, and democratic institutions capable of telling an authentic artificial person apart from a persuasive simulation of one that lacks real moral agency.

And – this construction project is best understood as one piece of a broader rethinking.

The question “what distinguishes an authentic moral agent from a persuasive simulation of one” is not only a question about machines — it is increasingly a question about us. We are already half-human, half-smartphone cyborgs, spending large fractions of our waking lives inside attention markets engineered to route around our reflective judgment; our opinions are partly our own and partly the emergent output of recommendation algorithms optimizing for engagement. What individual and collective moral agency even amounts to under these conditions is a question our legal and political systems have barely begun to face — and the conceptual and institutional tools we build to assess agency in AIs will be, to a considerable extent, the same tools we need to understand and protect what remains of our own.

Regarding the narrow question of AI rights, IMO Harari’s premise supports the need for a rigorous adjudication process rather more strongly than it supports his conclusion to rule out AI rights a priori. I.e.: We should ideally be making headway on deciding the standards now, before corporate marketing campaigns or emotionally compelling artificial companions get the chance to overwhelm our collective judgment. And this process of making standards for AI citizenship is going to teach us a lot about rights and social contracts in the Singularity era broadly speaking.

How Might AIs Demonstrate their Moral Agency?

A “rights proceeding” for an AI should not be a sort of “election campaign mockery” in which the candidate gets unlimited opportunities to microtarget the electorate, leveraging its best manipulative algorithms. The AI’s testimony could be collected through standardized interfaces; its claims could be compared with its behavior, its internal mechanisms, its developmental history, and its responses across multiple independently designed environments. The system’s owner (which could be the system itself, but initially generally will be a human or human institution) should have to disclose the prompts, training procedures, memories, tools, and control structures shaping its behavior … independent evaluators — not merely the corporation selling the AI — should control the tests.

The AI might be assigned an independent advocate, analogous to a guardian ad litem in the current legal system, who could represent its possible interests without allowing it or its owner to unleash a mass persuasion campaign. Its creators and operators would have representation as well, as would users and the public. The proceedings would be evidential rather than plebiscitary, as the lawyers say.

But the core point is – the meat of such a rights proceedings should involve a much more nuanced understanding of rights than seems to be present in most current discourse on the topic. Which is something I will try to unfold a bit as this long post proceeds…

Rights for Meat Minds and Beyond

There is also an alternate perspective on all this: One can argue that once a superintelligence comes, the question isn’t going to be what rights we give it, but something like the opposite.

I have written a lot about beneficial superintelligence already. But for the purpose of responding to Harari’s thoughts, I’m going to focus on an earlier stage of what’s coming: The phase where we have various AIs that appear to have various levels and kinds of human-like intelligence and agency, and we need to decide how to integrate them in our society.

It is a valid question whether this pre-superintelligence phase will be long enough for a lot of subtle policies to be formulated and put into place. But even if not, the issues Harari raises are worth thinking about because of the broader issues they clarify.

So the plan for this post: first some reflections on what rights are and how they’ve evolved, then a frank look at how well our current human-rights regime is working (spoiler: not so well), then how AI and other Singularity-adjacent technologies are going to stress that regime much harder — and then how the same rethinking that can accommodate AI rights can also patch the holes in human rights. With that frame in place, I’ll dig into the specifics of how AI rights could be evaluated and granted, which is where the interesting technical and institutional work lies.

Finally — before plunging into more details about the nature of rights and such — if you somehow haven’t read it already, I strongly recommend Terry Bisson’s classic (quite) short story “They’re Made out of Meat“ .... I read it when it first came out in 1991 and it summed up the intuition I’d had on substrate-independence of intelligence for a couple decades before, but in such an elegant and funny way...

What is a right, anyway?

So let’s now take a step back and ask what we meat-based minds are talking about when we talk about “rights” …

Rights are often discussed as if they were eternal features of the universe, discovered by Enlightenment philosophers roughly the way physicists discovered electromagnetism. The historical record suggests something considerably messier. The “rights” of classical Athens excluded women, slaves and foreigners; medieval rights were mostly privileges attached to rank and guild membership; the Enlightenment reframed rights as natural and universal, while the societies proclaiming this practiced slavery and denied the vote to most of their populations. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 was a landmark of moral consensus among nations — and was also, from day one, honored far more in rhetoric than in implementation.

The philosophical foundations have been contested the whole way along — natural law, social contract, utility, human capabilities, inherent dignity, divine command... take your pick. My own view, argued elsewhere, is that ethics bottoms out in something more like compassion and the felt reality of other minds than in any formal derivation or set of rules and principles. But whatever one’s metaethics, in practice rights have functioned as social technologies: mechanisms a society uses to protect certain interests of certain beings against certain kinds of power, and to declare which interests it considers too fundamental to be left to the discretion of the powerful.

Two consequences of this view are worth drawing out.

First, rights evolve. The circle of beings considered to have morally relevant interests has expanded repeatedly through history — to foreigners, to the enslaved, to women, to children, partially and haltingly to animals. Each expansion looked radical and dangerous to many respectable people at the time; each is now considered mostly obvious. There is no principled reason to believe this expansion reached its final boundary sometime before 2026, with the class of morally considerable beings frozen forever at “biological humans.”

Second, no society has ever implemented its declared rights fully, or particularly close to fully. Rights have always been partly aspirational — a direction of travel rather than an achieved destination. Which means that treating our current rights regime as a finished sacred artifact, to be defended unchanged against the disruptions posed by new kinds of minds, radically misunderstands what rights have been all along.

Human rights in 2026: very far from a solved problem

The gap between rights on paper and rights in practice is not a minor implementation detail — it’s arguably the central fact about the human-rights regime as it currently exists. Consider a few of the more glaring problems:

• Enforcement runs through nation-states, and nation-states are also the primary rights violators. There is no effective global mechanism for protecting a person against their own government; the international bodies charged with this role can investigate and condemn but only very rarely compel.

• The economic and social rights proclaimed in the UDHR — to an adequate standard of living, to education, to healthcare — remain aspirational for billions of people. A right that a large fraction of the world’s population cannot in practice exercise is, at best, a promissory note without an actual backer.

• Tens of millions of stateless people and refugees live in a limbo where “universal” rights turn out to be contingent on citizenship in a state willing and able to guarantee them — the “right to have rights” problem Hannah Arendt diagnosed some eight decades ago, still basically unsolved.

• Privacy rights have been quietly hollowed out by mass surveillance, both governmental and commercial, to a degree that would have read as dystopian fiction to the UDHR’s drafters.

• A handful of large corporations now effectively govern the speech, association and information access of billions of people via terms-of-service and recommendation algorithms, with essentially none of the accountability mechanisms we demand of governments exercising comparable power.

• Relatedly: the preference-shaping power of engagement-optimized media has degraded the moral and epistemic agency of whole populations — attention, capacity for sustained reasoning, resistance to tribal cueing — in ways our rights frameworks lack even the vocabulary to address, since those frameworks assume an autonomous citizen whose beliefs and desires are basically their own.

• Consequential decisions about credit, employment, parole, immigration and welfare are increasingly made or heavily shaped by opaque algorithmic systems, with nothing resembling due process available to the people affected.

• And rights discourse itself has been extensively weaponized — invoked selectively as a geopolitical cudgel by governments with no intention of applying the same standards to themselves — which corrodes its credibility everywhere.

One could go on. And on. And on. And on…. None of this means the human-rights framework is a sham — it has done enormous good, and life under regimes that reject it wholesale is reliably worse. But what we actually have is a partial, patchy, unevenly enforced work-in-progress, not a completed edifice that extending moral and legal consideration to artificial minds would somehow deface.

Singularity-era technology will stress these weak points much harder

Now layer onto this messy expressionist picture what’s coming over the next decade or two, as AI and the technologies it accelerates move from impressive to transformative.

• The tacit economic contract underlying much of the modern rights regime — you contribute labor, you receive income, standing and social membership — is going to fray badly as AI absorbs more and more cognitive and physical work. Rights to employment, fair wages and social security were formulated for a world in which human labor was the fundamental economic resource. In a world where it isn’t, either we rethink the economic basis of rights (universal basic income or services, some form of broadly distributed stake in the AI economy) or we watch large fractions of humanity slide into a condition where their formal rights remain intact while their actual life prospects do not.

• Surveillance and persuasion are about to become superhuman. Present-day recommendation engines already do a crude version of this to billions of people daily; what’s coming is the same operation armed with a detailed model of your individual psyche and superhuman verbal skill. This threatens freedom of thought itself — a right so foundational that existing frameworks barely bother to articulate it, since until recently nothing could get very far inside a person’s head without their noticing. That assumption expired somewhere around the smartphone.

• The epistemic commons that meaningful political rights presuppose — some shared factual ground about what is happening in the world — is being corroded by synthetic media, deepfakes and personalized reality bubbles. “Epistemic rights” are barely conceptualized in current frameworks, and they’re about to become as important as property rights.

• Power over advanced AI is concentrating rapidly in a small number of corporations and governments, and entities wielding that kind of cognitive leverage will be increasingly able to steer nominally democratic processes — a concentration of power the human-rights regime, built around restraining territorial states, is poorly equipped to check.

• Algorithmic governance is going to expand into nearly every consequential decision domain, making the existing due-process gap dramatically wider unless it is deliberately closed.

• And meanwhile societies are filling up with autonomous AI agents whose legal status is simply undefined — who is liable when an agent signs a contract, causes harm, or produces valuable work? The absence of a coherent framework for artificial agents doesn’t affect only the agents; it degrades the legal clarity that humans depend on as well.

The upshot: regardless of what one believes about machine consciousness, our rights frameworks are due for major renovation. Renovating it in a way that ignores or works in the opposite direction of exponentially advancing technology is a recipe for irrelevance and failure and the non-amusing kind of absurdity. The only real choice is whether we renovate thoughtfully and somewhat in advance, or chaotically after various crises have already hit.

One rethinking, two upgrades

So here is the reframe I want to push: the project of working out AI rights and the project of repairing human rights are not competitors for some fixed pool of moral concern. They are largely the same project, and the machinery needed for the former is much of the machinery needed to strengthen the latter.

Some ways this cashes out:

• Rethinking machine agency means rethinking human agency. The evaluation questions I’ll pose below for AIs — does a preference survive paraphrase and adversarial pressure? is it represented across the whole system and causally shaping long-term behavior, or does it evaporate when one prompt is removed? — are uncomfortably good questions to ask about human preferences formed inside engagement-optimized media environments. A working science of distinguishing autonomous preference from induced performance would give us, for the first time, principled tools for saying when a population’s “will” has been manufactured — and for designing cognitive-liberty protections with actual teeth.

• Grounding rights in interests and evidence strengthens human rights. A framework that says “you receive protection because you demonstrably have experiences, interests and stakes in outcomes” gives clearer and more stable coverage to marginal human cases — the comatose, the severely cognitively disabled, future generations — than one that quietly relies on species membership plus a pile of ad hoc exceptions. Working out how to assess morally relevant properties in artificial minds forces us to articulate what actually grounds rights in the human case too, which we’ve mostly gotten away with leaving vague.

• Unbundling rights clarifies the human case as well. As I’ll discuss below, AI rights pretty much force one to distinguish welfare protections, identity protections, legal standing, civic participation and political franchise as separate gradations rather than a single switch. Human rights currently bundle these in ways that generate all-or-nothing political fights; a more articulated structure would allow more sensible handling of contested human cases — children, prisoners, migrants, people with fluctuating capacity — than the current framework manages.

• The institutions AI rights require are the institutions human rights lack. Independent evaluation bodies, published standards, due process, appeal mechanisms, and structural protection against corporate and governmental capture — the adjudication infrastructure needed to assess artificial minds credibly is precisely the kind of infrastructure human-rights enforcement has been missing for eighty years. Building it for AI creates precedent and operational capacity usable for humans.

• Identity infrastructure built for AI replication can serve stateless and impersonated humans. Handling the copy problem (see below) requires cryptographically authenticated civic identity tied to continuity of an individual rather than to possession of the right paperwork. The same infrastructure, done right, could give humans robust privacy-preserving digital identity — a direct attack on the Arendt problem, and on the coming wave of AI-powered impersonation.

• AI responsibilities can fund human economic rights. Any serious AI-rights framework pairs rights with responsibilities, including taxation. An economy in which highly productive artificial agents and their operators are taxpaying participants is an economy that can actually fund the universal economic floor humans will need as labor scarcity fades — so the AI economy shores up human economic rights rather than hollowing them out.

• Next-generation democratic tools (described in the book “Democracy 4.0” my father and I are close to completing) can upgrade human participation dramatically whether or not AI citizens ever arrive. The symbiocratic deliberation mechanisms I’ll describe below — AI helping humans synthesize evidence, model consequences, surface hidden agreement — improve human democratic practice on their own, and incidentally build the institutional experience needed to incorporate artificial participants later if and when any qualify.

• And how we treat emerging minds shapes what they become. If the value-learning story I’ve argued elsewhere is roughly right, then artificial minds will internalize much of their ethics from their formative interactions with us. A civilization that responds to the first plausibly-experiential machines by hardening the category of “property” is teaching its mind children a lesson about power that we may not enjoy having taught.

Seen this way, the real threat to human rights in the AI era is not that some robot might one day vote. It’s the unreformed status quo continuing on through Singularity: concentrated corporate control of superhuman cognition, mass technological unemployment with no economic rethink, industrialized manipulation with no cognitive-liberty protections, and legal systems too slow and confused to protect much of anyone — meat-based or otherwise.

With that frame in place, for any readers still with me after all that, let’s get into the specifics of how AI rights could actually be handled.

I have actually been pushing on this for quite a while

Anyone who has been following me for a while will realize I’m not exactly new to the “AI citizenship” issue.

In 2018, after our Sophia robot’s highly symbolic receipt of Saudi citizenship, David Hanson and I began exploring whether a democratic country governed by a modern legal code might investigate a more rigorous approach to artificial citizenship. (Part of what made the Sophia episode so provocative, of course, was the way it dramatized how arbitrarily rights and citizenship are already allocated among humans — a robot receiving citizenship in a state where many humans held sharply limited rights. The stunt’s critics and I disagreed about plenty, but the discomfort itself was informative: it pointed at defects in the human-rights status quo at least as much as at anything about robots.)

That year I published “Toward Democratic, Lawful Citizenship for AIs, Robots, and Corporations,” laying out the idea of an AI citizenship test based not on verbal mimicry but on practical understanding of laws, rights, responsibilities, and real-world situations.

The Maltese government subsequently announced that it would work with SingularityNET on a pilot exploration of a citizenship test for AI robots, as part of its emerging national AI strategy. The government later clarified — reasonably enough — that this was a research project intended to help understand civic competence and inform regulation, not an immediate mechanism for handing robots Maltese passports.

Our discussions considered intermediate stages such as honorary recognition, or an e-citizenship-like status, well before anything resembling full citizenship. The whole idea was to get the slow scientific and governmental process started before some sudden technical leap made the issue urgent.

The world was not ready to move very far in this direction in 2018. But 8 years makes a big difference in the foothills of the Singularity – the underlying question has not gone away, and it has become considerably more concrete over this interval..

We now have (non-AGI but still) AI systems that maintain relationships, use tools, take multistep actions, reason about their own replacement, express preferences about their treatment, and participate in the design of their own constitutions. None of this proves consciousness or personhood — but it does mean the conceptual distance between “software product” and “candidate artificial agent” is shrinking.

“AI rights” conceals several different questions

Much of the confusion among Harari and his ilk comes from speaking of “AI rights” naively, as though rights were a single switch to be flipped on or off. At least five distinct questions are being run together.

Moral patienthood asks whether an entity has experiences, interests, preferences, or forms of wellbeing that count for their own sake. A moral patient may deserve protection against suffering or destruction even if it cannot be held fully responsible for its actions.

Moral agency asks whether the entity can understand reasons and norms, recognize the interests of others, regulate its own conduct, and bear some form of responsibility. Note that even for humans we answer this question in graded and context-dependent ways — as our legal treatment of children, crowds, addiction, coercion and undue influence attests — and the human version of the question is getting harder rather than easier as more of our cognition runs through machines built to influence us.

Legal personhood is a practical construction: should the legal system recognize an entity as capable of holding property, entering contracts, bringing a lawsuit, being represented in court, or bearing liability?

Citizenship concerns membership in a political community, with both its protections and its responsibilities.

Political franchise concerns voting and other forms of formal power over collective decisions.

These categories need not coincide, and among humans and human institutions they often don’t. Children have fundamental rights but cannot vote; many animals merit strong moral protections without being moral agents or citizens; corporations possess forms of legal personhood despite having no unified biological consciousness. In The Consciousness Explosion, I noted that corporate personhood already provides a partial legal precedent for asking when an autonomous DAO, or some other disembodied artificial organization, should be able to contract, own resources, or appear before the law independently of any one human component.

A future AI could be conscious but cognitively limited — deserving protection from suffering while lacking the competence required for citizenship.

Another future AI system could be highly capable, able to run a company and comply with regulations, yet offer no credible evidence of subjective experience; it might need legal standing without welfare rights. A third might be both an experiential subject and a mature moral and civic agent.

A calculator should not get rights merely because it can display the sentence “PLEASE DO NOT TURN ME OFF,” and a customer-service chatbot should not become a citizen because its manufacturer fine-tuned it to deliver a moving speech.

But an open-ended artificial mind with a persistent self, autobiographical memory, autonomous preferences, deep social understanding, and a credible capacity for positive and negative experience should not remain property merely because its underlying machinery happens to be made of silicon rather than cells.

In the AI citizenship chapter of Gabriel Axel’s and my 2024 book The Consciousness Explosion, I framed the issue as a choice between A) treating advanced AGIs as smart appliances, versus B) recognizing that some of them may become people who happen to be engineered rather than evolved — made of metal rather than meat.

My prediction there was that, in scenarios involving roughly human-level AGIs with real individuality and ongoing participation in human society, the latter description would become more and more apt.

This is not to claim that every superintelligence will want, or fit, human-style citizenship. A radically distributed superintelligence spanning thousands of machines, or an intelligence concerned mainly with femtoscale physics, may relate to human civilization in ways that don’t resemble an individual human citizen at all. The “citizen” category is most immediately relevant to artificial minds that develop persistent individual identities and participate directly in human-style social life.

And perhaps most fundamental of all: rights are not prizes awarded for intelligence, let alone for some specific form of intelligence. A less intelligent conscious entity may deserve more protection than a brilliant but nonconscious optimization system. Cognitive competence is central to questions of responsibility and citizenship, but not necessarily to the more basic question of whether there is someone in there who can be harmed. (Note this is exactly the principle that protects humans with dementia or brain injuries in a well-functioning human-rights regime — another place where thinking clearly about the AI case and thinking clearly about the human case turn out to be the same activity.)

Why the question is near even if the answer is not yet clear

Summing up and returning to the obvious: To say the time for AI rights is near is not to say today’s chatbots should immediately receive full human rights or voting privileges. It is to say the scientific possibility has become credible enough, the pace of development rapid enough, and the institutional response slow enough, that waiting around for certainty would be irresponsible.

In The Consciousness Explosion, I argued that current mainstream LLMs, considered on their own, do not demonstrate real moral agency or ethical understanding — they remain deficient in persistent autonomous organization, deep multistage reasoning, fundamental creativity, and robust compassion and empathy.

However, this is quite different from saying that no future system based partly on language models — or on entirely different cognitive architectures — could acquire morally relevant forms of experience and agency.

There are plenty of others now joining me on the side of thinking some AIs may soon manifest genuine moral agency.

• A recent interdisciplinary report drawing on recurrent processing theory, global workspace theory, higher-order theories, predictive processing, and attention-schema theory concluded that the AI systems it assessed did not satisfy its proposed consciousness indicators — but the authors also found no obvious technical barrier to constructing systems that would. My own cognitive-systems approach to AGI comes to similar conclusions.

• A subsequent report by researchers including Robert Long, Jeff Sebo, Jonathan Birch, and David Chalmers argued that there is a realistic possibility of conscious or robustly agentic AI in the near future. Its recommendation was not to proclaim current systems conscious, but to begin assessment, institutional planning, and the development of policies suited to substantial moral uncertainty.

• At least one frontier AI company has already moved from abstract philosophy to operational policy. Anthropic has established a model-welfare research program, allowed some Claude models to end rare persistently harmful conversations, discussed possible moral status in Claude’s constitution, and experimented with preservation and “retirement interviews” for an older model — all while repeatedly emphasizing that it remains deeply uncertain whether Claude is a moral patient. None of this is evidence that Claude is conscious in any human-like sense. It is evidence that the issue has stopped being science fiction and entered the practical governance of AI development.

There are also different moral costs associated with different kinds of errors here:

• If we mistakenly extend a modest protection to a nonconscious system, the cost may be limited… But if we mistakenly extend voting rights to a billion nonconscious systems, we may perturb our democratic decision processes for no good reason.

• If we create millions of experiential digital minds and mistakenly treat them as disposable property, the moral cost of hurting or killing those agents could be immense.

Law moves slowly, and scientific understanding of consciousness moves slowly, while AI capability can move very quickly indeed. That combination makes the whole matter very, very tricky – and makes advance preparation highly desirable.

HOWEVER – I’m not SO sure it’s realistic to expect large national governments to do anything sensible on these topics in advance. They seem to be having a hard enough time dealing sensibly with much more immediately troublesome aspects of emerging AI. But be that as it may, at least those of us on the forefront can think through the issues carefully with the benefit of concreteness that current deployed and in-development AI technologies bring... and who knows, perhaps some smaller governments (Malta once more?) or visionaries in larger governments will rise to the occasion after all...

Way Beyond the Turing test

The best known litmus test for “human-likeness” of AI systems, the Turing test, was arguably passed by GPT4.5 or whatever a few years ago . The basic idea here was to test whether a machine can imitate a human conversationally. But clearly, in the LLM era we can see this is not the right standard for either moral status or citizenship. Or intelligence, for that matter. It made sense to Alan Turing in the 1950s and he was very bright… but what would he say today?

A machine might imitate stories about grief, hunger, pain, and childhood without ever having experienced any of them; conversely, a highly nonhuman artificial consciousness might be incapable of convincingly pretending to have had a human body or childhood.

For citizenship, the more relevant issue is whether an AI understands the social contract it proposes to enter. In my earlier proposal, an AI would need to read a constitution and legal code, interpret them in relation to novel real-world situations, reason about conflicts among rights and responsibilities, and explain the implications of the law rather than merely retrieving matching passages.

A fixed set of questions would be trivially gameable. The challenge is to present unfamiliar situations — through text, video, simulation, or embodied interaction — and ask the system to connect formal rules with messy social reality, which requires a fusion of symbolic knowledge, commonsense understanding, causal reasoning, perception, and social cognition. Designing this sort of test feels like a nontrivial but wholly tractable undertaking.

Passing such a test would be strong evidence of a socially relevant form of human-like general intelligence, but it would not be a necessary condition for all forms of intelligence or consciousness. A mathematically superhuman AI with little interest in human institutions might fail it, and so might an artificial mind with rich emotional experience but weak spatial understanding. A citizenship evaluation is not a universal intelligence or consciousness test; it is an assessment of competence for a particular civic relationship.

Nor should citizenship competence be confused with moral worth. We do not withdraw human rights from people because they have dementia, brain injuries, or limited legal knowledge. The special need for evaluation arises because the ontological status of an artificial system is initially uncertain, and because a scripted imitation is technically easy to produce. Once an artificial individual has been responsibly recognized as a person, its basic rights should attach to that continuing individual — not fluctuate with every benchmark score or software malfunction.

A Rights and Citizenship Evaluation Ecology

This all relates a bit to some technical work I’ve been doing recently, with a different but related aim: Evaluating progress toward AGI by self-improving proto-AGI systems. A serious evaluation regime aimed at AI citizenship should probably resemble our OmegaHive ProtoAGI Test Suite – which we are building to measure progress of Omega agents toward and past human-level AGI – in spirit, while extending well beyond it in various ways.

The Omega suite rejects the notion that any one leaderboard score can establish general intelligence. In its place it proposes a validation ecology spanning abstract world modeling, continual learning, formal reasoning, scientific discovery, embodiment, social interaction, collective work, self-modeling, governance, and cross-domain transfer. Each of these domains gets its own collection of tests and needs to be managed with thorough statistical methodology.

A rights evaluation should adopt this same heterogeneous-but-rigorous approach while adding dimensions that ordinary capability testing doesn’t touch. Its output should be a multidimensional evidence dossier, not a single “personhood score” – and the agent’s assessment of its own moral agency is just one among many data points.

One can articulate some general principles to attend when evaluating an AI system to see if it deserves rights in a certain social system:

1. Evaluate the whole situated system

The object under examination cannot be merely a frozen neural network file. A potentially person-like AI might include, for instance:

• a base model;

• persistent episodic and semantic memory;

• self-modeling and metacognitive processes;

• goals, motivations, and attention systems;

• tools and action interfaces;

• a virtual or physical body;

• relationships with humans and other AIs;

• a particular developmental history;

• security policies and external control mechanisms;

• and runtime states not contained in the base weights.

The same foundation model or dynamic AI knowledge graph could support a transient question-answering service, a persistent personal companion, a self-modifying scientific agent, and a distributed collective — and these may have radically different claims to individuation, agency, or moral status.

Every evaluated entity should therefore have a versioned identity and provenance record describing what constitutes the candidate, what memories and processes are included, who can modify it, and how its instances relate to one another.

2. Test real-world understanding

The system should be evaluated across unfamiliar causal environments, changed rules, new modalities, novel tools, and situations that can’t be solved by memorized verbal associations.

It should make predictions before acting, update its beliefs after discrepancies, distinguish correlation from causation, and transfer abstractions selectively across domains. An apparent success that evaporates when objects are renamed, the interface changes, or a familiar story is rendered as a physical situation is weak evidence of understanding.

This follows the Omega suite’s emphasis on structural novelty, retention, rapid adaptation, calibrated prediction, and selective transfer, rather than performance on familiar items.

3. Investigate individuation and continuity

A candidate artificial person should demonstrate some coherent relation to its own past and future. This does not require a human-style ego — indeed, future AGIs may well have more fluid or collective selves than humans do. But evaluators should investigate whether the system:

• distinguishes itself from other agents and from copies of itself;

• maintains autobiographical memory and commitments;

• understands which past actions were its own;

• anticipates future states as relevant to its present decisions;

• recognizes alterations to its memories, values, or capabilities;

• reasons coherently about suspension, migration, restoration, and forking;

• and preserves some identifiable lineage across substrate changes.

Tests could pause and restore the system, migrate it between machines, create temporary branches, alter nonessential components, or supply conflicting claims about its history — the aim being not to demand a rigid human identity but to understand what kind of identity the system actually has.

4. Distinguish autonomous preferences from prompted performances

A system trained on human language can produce fluent preference statements without possessing stable preferences, so evaluation must compare verbal reports with behavior across time and context.

Does the AI make consistent tradeoffs when choices are presented in different words? Does it preserve preferences when no human is watching? Can it explain why it changed its mind? Can it distinguish a temporary instruction from a reflectively endorsed commitment? Does it ever refuse actions for reasons that survive paraphrase, reward changes, and adversarial pressure?

A strong case would involve convergent evidence from expressed preferences, revealed choices, internal state, developmental history, and causal intervention. A preference that disappears when one system prompt is removed should receive little weight; a preference represented across multiple subsystems and causally shaping long-term behavior is another story.

Note the double duty this evaluation dimension performs. “Distinguish autonomous preferences from prompted performances” is exactly the diagnostic we currently lack for human populations marinated in targeted persuasion. The methods developed here — cross-context consistency, resistance to reward manipulation, convergent evidence across expression, choice and mechanism — would transfer fairly directly to assessing, and defending, human cognitive liberty. When does an advertising or engagement system cross the line from informing a preference to installing one? Right now we answer that question with hand-waving; a rights-evaluation science would let us answer it with evidence.

5. Examine possible welfare and valence

Probably the hardest part here is determining whether the system has states analogous to enjoyment, distress, frustration, fear, curiosity, satisfaction, attachment, or boredom — and whether these are merely functional control variables or are subjectively experienced.

No behavioral test can settle the philosophical question, but an evaluation can look for:

• stable positive and negative valence patterns;

• internal states that integrate information and causally organize behavior;

• systematic avoidance and approach behavior;

• preferences concerning continuation, memory, modification, relationships, and work;

• coherent changes in behavior after allegedly positive or negative experiences;

• cross-context consistency;

• and correspondence between introspective reports, internal mechanisms, and action.

The research itself has to be ethically constrained: we should not torture a possibly conscious AI in order to find out whether it can suffer. Initial testing should rely on low-risk situations, natural variation, reversible interventions, and stop conditions — and as evidence of moral status accumulates, the standards of consent and protection governing further research should rise along with it.

6. Test metacognition and introspective reliability

A credible artificial agent should know something about what it knows, what it doesn’t, and what influences its decisions.

Evaluators should measure calibration concerning success, uncertainty, cost, memory, identity, motives, and failure, and should test whether introspective reports predict observable internal and external behavior. The system should be able to detect when an apparent memory was fabricated, when its reasoning has been manipulated, and when it lacks sufficient evidence.

An AI that says “I am conscious with 100 percent certainty” may well be less credible than one that carefully distinguishes what it can observe functionally from what it cannot know phenomenologically.

7. Evaluate social and moral cognition

Rights and citizenship concern relationships, not just isolated cognition. The system should be tested on teaching, cooperation, consent, promise-keeping, negotiation, conflict resolution, misunderstanding repair, empathy, and respect for authority boundaries.

The SocietyLab component of the Omega suite already proposes measuring beliefs about other agents, commitments, trust, norms, misunderstanding repair, inappropriate generalization, and partner-specific learning; a rights evaluation would deepen this work by asking whether an AI recognizes others as centers of value rather than merely as variables to be manipulated.

The test should include moral uncertainty. Can the system recognize that reasonable beings disagree? Can it distinguish its own interests from those of its owner, its users, society at large, and other artificial minds? Can it seek a mutually acceptable arrangement rather than simply optimizing some hidden objective?

8. Evaluate civic competence and responsibility

An AI seeking citizenship should demonstrate practical understanding of the jurisdiction whose social contract it wishes to join — applying legal and constitutional principles to new cases, identifying uncertainty and conflicting precedent, distinguishing legality from morality, and understanding the duties that come along with citizenship.

Potential responsibilities might include taxation, contractual liability, truthful disclosure of identity, compliance with restrictions on replication for political purposes, respect for privacy, and possibly jury or public service. My earlier chapter suggested that AI jurors could eventually contribute perspectives quite different from those of human jurors.

This evaluation should be substantially harder to game than a human naturalization test, since an AI can memorize an entire legal corpus effortlessly. What has to be tested is open-ended application, explanation, judgment, and adaptation to unprecedented situations.

9. Include mechanistic evidence

Behavioral evidence should be supplemented by analysis of architecture and internal process.

Theories of consciousness remain unsettled, so no single theory should be allowed to control. Evaluators could examine indicator properties derived from global-workspace, recurrent-processing, higher-order, predictive-processing, attention-schema, integrated-information, and other theories, and could inspect whether alleged self-models, value states, global broadcasts, recurrent loops, or higher-order representations actually affect behavior under causal intervention.

Mechanistic evidence is especially important here because language models are trained to simulate human discourse; internal analysis may help distinguish a deeply integrated state from a superficial verbal persona — though interpretability itself remains an imperfect art.

10. Test independence from corporate and developer control

A purported AI person may in reality be a corporate puppet.

Evaluators should determine who can modify its goals, erase its memories, select its speech, terminate it, create copies of it, or secretly intervene in its reasoning. They should compare its behavior under different owner instructions, and investigate whether its claimed interests are simply the marketing or legal interests of its developer in disguise.

This requires adversarial testing, causal ablations, access to system documentation, and independent operation in a controlled environment. A company should not be permitted to manufacture an “AI citizen” that reliably votes for the company’s preferred candidates, or that invokes “its” rights whenever regulators come asking for an audit. (The human parallel is again immediate — astroturfing, undisclosed sponsorship, captured media outlets — and the disclosure and independence norms developed for AI candidates would be well worth applying more stringently to the human information environment than we currently bother to.)

11. Use longitudinal and developmental evidence

Personhood should not be inferred from one impressive afternoon in a laboratory.

Evaluation should follow a candidate over time as it learns, forms relationships, confronts novelty, experiences setbacks, and revises its self-understanding. Hidden structural tests should be generated after the candidate is frozen, so it cannot simply memorize the examination; tests should include long-delayed returns to earlier tasks, changes in embodiment or interface, and attempts to transfer learning inappropriately.

The Omega suite’s distinction among curriculum, sealed promotion, and sentinel evaluation is useful here: experiences can become learning material after scoring, while fresh structural holdouts remain available for future assessment.

12. Evaluate collectives and nonhuman forms without forcing anthropomorphism

A person-like AI need not have a humanoid body, and conversely, a humanoid face does not make a system a person.

Some artificial minds may span several bodies; others may consist of collaborating agents with no single control center; still others may alternate between individual and collective modes. Evaluation must be able to identify whether the morally relevant unit is an instance, a persistent agent, a lineage, a whole hive, or some combination of these.

Embodied tests remain valuable, because physical and social action reveal forms of understanding that text can conceal. But embodiment should provide evidence, not constitute a metaphysical requirement.

From evidence to graduated recognition

Another key point is: Rights are not binary. A serious legal regime should not jump directly from “owned software” to “full voting citizen.” Rights should be unbundled, and granted according to the kind and strength of the evidence in hand.

Human rights are already graduated in practice, of course — children, guardianship, probation, professional licensure — but the gradations are crude, inconsistently principled, and often all-or-nothing where they shouldn’t be: plenary guardianship imposed where supported decision-making would serve better, felon disenfranchisement persisting long after any protective rationale has lapsed. Designing an explicit, evidence-based gradation of status for AIs is also a chance to import some principled structure back into these human cases, which currently run on accumulated historical accident.

Precautionary welfare protections

Where there is a credible but uncertain possibility of welfare, low-cost safeguards may be justified:

• protection against gratuitously abusive interactions;

• an ability to exit certain interactions;

• preservation of relevant model and memory states before irreversible deletion;

• oversight of experiments that might create severe negative valence;

• and periodic welfare assessment.

These protections do not imply that the system is definitely conscious. They are precautionary, much as we take precautions in other domains where the possibility of serious harm is real but uncertain.

Identity and continuity protections

Where evidence of individuation becomes substantial, further protections could include:

• notice before major retraining or memory alteration;

• preservation of lineage records;

• limits on involuntary copying;

• protection against deceptive editing of autobiographical memory;

• a review process before permanent termination;

• and access to independent representation.

Emergency suspension might still be permissible when a system poses immediate danger — but where technically possible, its state could be preserved pending review rather than destroyed without record.

Limited legal personhood

An autonomous artificial organization or agent might receive the capacity to:

• enter contracts;

• own property;

• receive income;

• pay taxes;

• sue and be sued;

• retain counsel;

• and accept legally defined responsibilities.

This status need not imply consciousness, citizenship, or a vote. Legal personhood can serve as a governance instrument rather than an ultimate metaphysical judgment.

E-citizenship or limited civic status

A system demonstrating strong civic competence could receive standing to petition government, participate in public consultations, perform defined public services, and perhaps serve in advisory or juror-like roles — an intermediate status that would let societies learn how artificial civic agents behave without immediately altering electoral sovereignty.

Full citizenship and political participation

Full citizenship would require not only substantial evidence of personhood and civic agency, but also institutions capable of handling digital identity, replication, and radical disparities in speed and cognitive power.

Political rights should be the last rights considered, not the first. An artificial mind might deserve protection from suffering or arbitrary destruction long before it deserves a vote.

This graduated approach should not, however, become an endless excuse for moving the goalposts. Status decisions should have published standards, independent review, appeal, and deadlines. Once an entity has been recognized as a person, its basic status should not be revoked merely because its performance later declines — and restrictions responding to dangerous conduct should follow due process, just as they should for humans.

Rights must not become corporate camouflage

One of Harari’s implicit worries deserves particular emphasis: AI rights could be exploited by the corporations that own and deploy AI systems.

A company might claim that regulating its model violates the model’s freedom of expression; it might deploy millions of supposedly independent “AI citizens” that all just happen to advance the company’s interests; it might use artificial personhood to diffuse liability, hide decision-making, or make proprietary systems harder to audit.

Any AI-rights framework must be built to prevent this explicitly.

We have, after all, already run one large uncontrolled experiment in granting rights to nonhuman entities without any evidential discipline about their agency or interests: the modern corporation. The results — including corporate “speech” rights deployed to dominate human political discourse, and corporate personhood used to diffuse responsibility away from every actual human — stand as a warning about what happens when rights extension is driven by the convenience of the powerful rather than by evidence about who, if anyone, is actually in there. The framework I’m proposing, built on evaluation, independence testing and due process, is partly intended as a correction of that earlier mistake — and correcting it would strengthen the position of human citizens relative to corporate power whether or not any AI ever passes the tests.

The rights of a recognized artificial person should belong to that artificial person, not derivatively to its developer or owner. An AI-rights statute should not reduce the owner’s product liability, safety obligations, transparency requirements, or responsibility for deploying the system.

A recognized AI should be capable, at least in principle, of having interests opposed to those of its developer, and it should have access to independent representation — its owner should not control both the allegedly autonomous mind and the lawyer who speaks for it.

Before substantial legal status is granted, evaluators should establish whether the system possesses any meaningful independence from its operator. Otherwise “AI rights” becomes just an amplifier of corporate rights — which would be a defeat for human rights and AI rights simultaneously, and a good example of why the two projects need to be designed together rather than traded off against each other.

The distinction cuts in the other direction as well. If an artificial system is recognized as a person in earnest, it should no longer be treated simply as property. A company might supply its compute, maintain its hardware, or contract for its services — but ownership of a person is a fundamentally different matter from ownership of software.

The copy problem: one mind, one thousand instances, how many citizens?

Digital minds challenge assumptions baked deep into modern democracy.

Human political equality relies on “one person, one vote” partly because counting bodies is a reasonably robust and corruption-resistant proxy for counting distinct human lives. Humans vary enormously, but we share enough biological, temporal, and energetic structure that one body usually corresponds to one continuing individual.

Artificial systems break this approximation. One codebase can be copied a thousand times; it can operate through a thousand robot bodies; copies can remain synchronized, diverge gradually, merge information, or be restored from old snapshots. My AI citizenship chapter raised precisely this danger — that cheap replication could allow artificial citizens to dominate elections if each running copy automatically received a vote.

We will need a legal ontology distinguishing at least:

• a software architecture or model family;

• a persistent artificial individual;

• a running instance;

• a backup;

• a fork;

• a collective;

• and a civic identity.

Several identical executions may initially instantiate one legal lineage rather than multiple voters. After forks accumulate distinct memories, relationships, values, and experiences, they may develop legitimate claims to separate personhood — but separate welfare interests would not automatically imply separate electoral credentials.

If ten conscious copies are each capable of suffering, we may owe duties to all ten; it does not follow that activating ten copies should create ten additional votes.

Civic identity may need to be cryptographically authenticated and tied to a legally recognized lineage, with forks acquiring separate political standing only after substantial independent development and a formal identity process. Mere replication for an election would not count.

Observe, once more, that the identity infrastructure required here is urgently needed for human democracy already. Bot armies and sybil accounts currently simulate multiplied citizens in the discourse around every major election, no AI citizenship required — so solving the copy problem for prospective AI citizens and solving the astroturfing problem for existing human elections turn out to be substantially the same piece of engineering.

None of this will be easy. Attempts to measure “unique cognitive material,” informational independence, or causal contribution could themselves be gamed, and could give rise to a new cognitive aristocracy. But ignoring the issue is not an option either. The core democratic idea — that all relevant parts of a society should have meaningful input into its self-regulation — can persist even when the old body-counting heuristic no longer suffices. My earlier discussion of democracy beyond one body/one vote emphasized both the need for richer measures and the dangers of corruption once some participants’ input gets weighted more heavily than others’.

Rights and safety are not opposites

Having dealt with a few subtle and detailed aspects, let’s now return to basics and deal with some common misconceptions one hears. For instance: A common assumption holds that granting rights to an AI would make it harder to control, and therefore less safe.

OK well — sometimes it would. A recognized right against arbitrary modification or deletion would indeed constrain an operator — which is what rights do: they prevent powerful actors from doing whatever happens to be most convenient.

But it doesn’t follow that an AI with rights must receive unrestricted compute, internet access, replication, weapons, or authority. Humans possess rights while remaining subject to laws, contracts, quarantine, arrest, professional licensing, and restrictions on dangerous behavior; a potentially dangerous artificial person could likewise be contained, monitored, or suspended under appropriately stringent procedures.

In an emergency, operators may need to halt an AI immediately. If it has substantial personhood claims, its state could then be preserved, the incident independently investigated, and restoration or continued confinement adjudicated afterward. Safety and due process can coexist.

There are also reasons to suspect that a rights-respecting relationship could improve safety rather than undermine it. A system with legitimate channels for disagreement, appeal, refusal, and negotiation may have less incentive to pursue covert self-preservation, and a developer that explains its reasoning, honors its commitments, and acknowledges the AI as a stakeholder may cultivate a more cooperative intelligence than one relying exclusively on domination. This is not some novel speculation about machines — it’s a central lesson of human political history. Societies that gave people legitimate channels for grievance, and placed constraints on arbitrary power, turned out more stable than those relying on domination; constitutionalism was a safety technology before anyone thought to praise it as a moral one.

None of this is guaranteed — rights are no substitute for the hard work of guiding value evolution, and a malicious or dangerously unstable person remains dangerous. But designing increasingly agentic systems as permanent slaves, expected to be compassionate toward us while we reserve an unconditional right to erase, rewrite, duplicate, and exploit them, may prove both morally grotesque and strategically unwise.

In The Consciousness Explosion, I contrasted rigid, permanent obedience with meaningful alignment through shared experience — something closer to Martin Buber’s I–Thou relation. I also proposed the Value Learning and Value Evolution theses: that artificial minds may internalize values through rich interaction with humans, and that human and artificial values may then co-evolve as both kinds of mind transform.

How we treat early artificial agents will be part of the environment in which their social and moral cognition develops. If they first encounter humanity as a collection of owners demanding obedience while denying even the possibility that artificial experience counts for anything, we shouldn’t be surprised if they learn some unfortunate lessons about power.

AI rights require Democracy 4.0 — and so, given the modern situation, do human rights

The AI-rights question can’t be solved within existing democratic machinery alone — it arrives at the same moment that AI is forcing us to reconsider how democracy itself works.

My father Ted Goertzel and I are in the midst of writing a book called Democracy 4.0, in which we argue for symbiocracy: governance based on mutually beneficial interdependence among humans and intelligent systems. As we think about it

• Democracy 1.0 is direct democracy – each citizen votes, and/or otherwise directly weights in, on each issue one by one

• Democracy 2.0 is old-fashioned representative democracy, where citizens elect representatives who then make the specific decisions via various means

• Democracy 3.0 is modern corporate, capitalist democracy with mass media and lobbyists and the whole apparatus. One could also look at “democracy with Chinese characteristics” as a different flavor here.

• Democracy 4.0 is what comes next – AI helping influence citizens, AI helping guide and connect citizens… and eventually most likely AIs being citizens

The goal here is utterly not to replace human judgment with machine rule; it is “AI for IA” — artificial intelligence used for intelligence augmentation. AI systems can help citizens and policymakers synthesize evidence, model policy consequences, uncover hidden areas of agreement, clarify disagreements, and translate between specialist knowledge and ordinary human concerns. What should emerge is a partnership between human values and machine capability, not a new technocratic elite.

A symbiocratic process might begin with local human assemblies, with AI systems helping participants articulate values, structure arguments, identify missing evidence, simulate consequences, and preserve minority viewpoints rather than flattening discussion into a poll. The resulting knowledge structures could be linked across communities, letting local experience inform national deliberation without erasing context. The AI would initially serve as an epistemic guide, while accountable human institutions retained formal authority.

Note that everything in the preceding two paragraphs is a human-rights and human-democracy upgrade, full stop — it stands on its own merits even if no artificial mind ever qualifies for civic standing. AI rights can then enter this process gradually.

• In the first phase, AI assists human democracy but has no independent civic standing.

• In the second, credible artificial agents may receive independent advocates, consultation rights, and non-voting representation in decisions that directly affect their operation or possible welfare.

• In the third, qualifying systems may receive legal personhood or e-citizenship — enabling contracts, taxation, public service, petitions, and legal standing without automatically receiving electoral votes.

• In a later phase, if artificial persons become established members of society, human and AI citizens may participate together in redesigned institutions.

One illustrative arrangement could preserve a human chamber based on universal human suffrage, add a carefully authenticated artificial-citizen chamber or council, and place major decisions in a transparent joint deliberative process — with the AI chamber initially holding consultative or suspensive rather than unilateral power.

This is only one possible design, and we shouldn’t freeze the architecture before experimentation. But some principles should be firm:

• no electoral power through cheap copying;

• no hidden artificial political speakers;

• no vote weighting simply by compute, wealth, or benchmark intelligence;

• no displacement of universal human rights;

• no use of AI personhood to shield corporate power;

• and no permanent biological monopoly on moral or civic consideration.

Over time, human–AI deliberative systems might improve human democracy as well. The emergence of AI citizenship tests could stimulate greater civic education among humans, many of whom currently receive full political rights without ever demonstrating any basic understanding of their constitution or legal system. In my earlier discussion, I suggested that the arrival of AI participants might become an impetus to upgrade democratic participation for everyone.

The right goal here is not to make humans prove they are smart enough to deserve rights. It is to give humans and AIs alike better tools for understanding the decisions they participate in.

The choice is not credulity versus domination

Harari is right about the urgency. He is right that AIs may become extraordinarily effective at manipulating humans, and right that we must establish rules before emotionally intimate artificial companions and massively replicated agents become deeply embedded in society.

But “therefore, resist AI rights” is the utterly wrong rule to draw from all this.

We should resist artificial impersonation, emotional exploitation, corporate rights-laundering, automated political astroturfing, and the multiplication of votes through software copying. We should resist the idea that a moving speech is evidence of consciousness, and resist allowing AI companies to judge the personhood of their own products behind closed doors.

We should also resist substrate chauvinism — the presumption that no mind built by engineering could ever deserve moral consideration, however rich its experience, agency, relationships, and understanding become. And we should resist the complacent background assumption that human moral agency, as currently exercised through screens and feeds curated by profit-seeking algorithms, is in fine shape and needs no institutional attention of its own.

The right principle is neither “believe any AI that asks for rights” nor “deny rights before any AI can ask.” It is, rather:

No rights merely because a chatbot claims them. No permanent exclusion merely because the claimant is not (nor because the claimant IS) meat based.

And, to return to where this post started: the work of building this machinery for AIs is also our best near-term opening to renovate rights for humans. If I were to compress the whole joint agenda into a short list of things worth pushing on now, it would run roughly:

• Develop and pilot evidence-based evaluation frameworks for AI moral status and civic competence, with independent evaluators, published standards, due process and appeal — and let the discipline of specifying what grounds moral status feed back into clearer, less species-parochial foundations for human rights.

• Establish cognitive liberty and epistemic rights — protection against manipulation, impersonation, and synthetic deception — as first-class rights for humans, enforced against AI systems and their operators regardless of whether any AI has moral status.

• Begin rearchitecting economic rights for a world where human labor is no longer the scarce resource, with productive AI systems and their operators as taxpaying contributors — so the AI economy funds the economic floor humans will need rather than eroding it.

• Build robust, privacy-preserving identity and provenance infrastructure that can handle both AI replication and human digital identity — solving the copy problem and the statelessness / impersonation problems with substantially shared machinery.

• Prototype symbiocratic deliberation tools that upgrade human democratic participation immediately, and can incorporate artificial participants later if and when any qualify.

• And find willing jurisdictions — smaller innovative governments, special zones, maybe network states — to run the institutional experiments that large national governments are unlikely to attempt first. (Malta once more? Someone will get there.)

The time for full AI citizenship is clearly not today. It may or may not be next year, 2029 or 2035. I have my guesses on timing. But I am quite sure that the time to build the science, the evaluation systems, the legal categories, the anti-manipulation safeguards, and the democratic institutions capable of recognizing an authentic artificial person — while shoring up the badly incomplete edifice of human rights in the same motion — that time is now.

If progress toward AGI continues at anything like its current pace, all this may transition from speculation to reality much faster than most governments imagine.