Science fiction has long been fascinated with the potential for sentient, human-like artificial persons. Even before reality meets fantasy, individuals, governments and businesses already entrust AI to make automated decisions with potential for real-life impact. What are the implications for AI legal personhood?
This work examines how different legal entities differ in rights and duties and considers historical examples that show how legal personhood status can change over time under economic, social and pragmatic pressures. By abandoning the traditional binary, characteristics-based concept of the legal person for a historical lens, we are left with a more nuanced concept of the legal person against which sentience matters far less than what we might otherwise assume.