ABSTRACT
The chapter first summarizes the three capacities I attribute to all normal human beings but which are usually withheld from AI entities: (i) possessing an ‘I’ that underwrites the First Person Perspective; (ii) preventing Reflexivity because there is no Self on which the FPP could bend backwards; (iii) precluding ‘concerns’ in the absence of a Self to whom they matter. All three are challenged as the main objections to AI personhood. Instead, I maintain that synergy between human beings and AI entities can relationally generate these emergent properties and powers through their co-working.
Based on a fictional story about the joint action of a Medical researcher and his AI assistant, their collaboration engenders realist ‘we-thinking’ through (a) the AI’s learning about the limitations of his pre-programming and the adaptive affordances he can introduce; (b) his reflexive recognition of the contribution he has made to generating relational goods through the research project; (c) his awareness (concern) that his own endurance matters because this joint-action depends upon his survival.
Through synergy, joint-action leads to; (I) Joint-commitment (and not vice versa), and; (II) to an AI being acquiring the three necessary conditions for Personhood.
