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Short abstract:

What are the legal implications of granting personhood rights to artificial agents (AI robots) to enable liability claims, while also granting neuro-rights to humans to protect them against neurotechnological altering of their brain? Advances in Brain-Computer Interfaces seem to dissolve the binary.

Long abstract:

In May 2017 the European Parliament’s Committee on Legal Affairs submitted recommendations to the EU Commission on Civil Law Rules and Robotics requesting them to develop new legislation addressing the challenges of “intelligent machines” described as “androids with human features”. The Motion recommends “a specific legal status for robots” with the aim of “applying electronic personality to cases where robots make autonomous decisions or otherwise interact with third parties independently”. In December 2022, the EU published the Neurotechnologies and Human Rights Framework. Do we need New Rights? in which the need to extend human rights with ‘neuro-rights’ is proposed. Recent innovations in brain-implants show not only the medical and therapeutic prospects of reactivating lost functions, but also the possibility to intervene in our notions of self-awareness, memory, and self-control; the de- and re-coding of neural pathways is no longer science fiction but being tested in labs around the world. Corporations, from OpenAI, Neuralink to Microsoft and Google invest billions in Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI); military applications have implicated them in the military industrial complex.

This paper examines how socio-political and legal narratives about “rights for AI robots” and “rights for human brains” reconfigure the fundamental legal binaries of persons and things, and artificial (AI) and natural (human) agency. If hybridization of biological and computational “brains” leads to “cognitive assemblages” (Hayles 2016), does the split EU proposal—one offering robots personhood making them liable for causing harm, and one offering neuro-rights to humans to protect them from computational neurotechnological harm—need to be unified?