Yuval Noah Harari

And some countries, I can imagine, say a country like Qatar, which has a lot of money, a lot of energy, and very few citizens, saying, oh, wonderful, I can now have millions of AI citizens paying taxes and building companies that trade and do business all over the world.

So even if your country doesn't allow AIs,

to build their own companies, what do you do about the Qatari AI companies?

The moment you recognize AIs as legal persons, this is the moment you really lose control.

Because then they can start doing a lot of things in the economic and social and political arena without any human accountability.

including, for instance, to donate money to politicians in exchange for the politicians taking care of giving more rights to AI persons.

The companies who produce the AIs have a vested interest in not having any liability.

So they are pushing very, very hard for AI personhood.

Now, they don't want a bill in Congress saying, we recognize AIs as persons because there will be a huge public outcry and resistance.

They try to establish facts on the ground.

They already succeeded, for instance, in social media.

In the universe of social media, AIs are already persons.

Like if you have bots creating and spreading lies on social media, effectively there is almost no liability.

On social media, they are functionally persons.

You communicate with someone online, you think it's a person, no, it's an AI.

And nobody's liable for that.

Many of the companies would like to extend this situation to the financial system, to the political system, because it releases them of accountability and liability.

We need to be proactive and have a law that clearly states no AI persons.

And I imagine there would be parties and support for that law, and it will put the companies in a very hard spot, because if they would try to lobby against the law, they will have to explain to the public, why do you think it's a good idea that AI will be persons?

And if you don't think that, why do you oppose the law?