This chart (which applies even more to social media than it did to TV) lives in my head rent free.

Social media enveloping traditional media means everything and everyone is now competing in the entertainment market. Boring stuff like policy that affects millions of lives doesn’t stand a chance.

These ideas are also at the heart of my new book "What Is Intelligence?" (out via @mitpress.bsky.social & Antikythera), where I explore how human-technology symbiosis may be the latest Major Evolutionary Transition: bit.ly/3H1p8F6

Like, even before JS Mill gave us a utilitarian ("net upside") argument to justify freedom of speech, there was an older intuition that banning symbols risks doing violence to thought itself, and ought to be approached with "warinesse."

I've managed it a few times..! Though not too many

Noticed that my latest paper announcement got much more attention on Bluesky than twitter, first time that happened in my experience

Except the linked paper agrees with the comment on personhood in this thread. It says we should stop the metaphysics and refocus on pragmatic effects of institutions and individuals deeming entities to be persons.

[9/9] Read the full paper here:
arxiv.org/abs/2510.26396

Coauthors:

Sasha Vezhnevets,
@xtan,
@WilCunningham

[8/9] By rejecting the foundationalist quest for a single, essential definition, our pragmatic approach offers a more flexible way to think about integrating AI agents into our society. Different “personhood-related contexts” call for different solutions. There are no panaceas.

[7/9] We also consider "personhood as a problem".

This includes "dark patterns" where AI systems may be designed to mimic social cues and exploit our social heuristics, leading to risks of emotional manipulation and exploitation.

In this case, personhood attribution causes harm.

[6/9] However, there may also be ownerless autonomous agents. In this case, we may confer a default person-like status to support sanctionability in cases where they cause harm. An AI with assets can be deterred from rule breaking by the threat of having to forfeit them.

[5/9] We explore "personhood as a solution" for problems like "responsibility gaps".

Most AI agents will have owners or guardians, in this case responsibility should usually flow to their principal.

[4/9] With major inspiration from Richard Rorty, the pragmatic framework we propose holds that the personhood bundle can be unbundled.

We can craft bespoke solutions: sanctionability without suffrage, culpability and contracting without consciousness attribution, etc.

[3/9] The common "foundationalist" view – which bases personhood on properties like consciousness or rationality – forces an untenable, all-or-nothing choice: an AI must either be a full person or a "mere thing". We argue this rigid binary is ill-suited for the challenges ahead.

[2/9] We argue that instead of getting stuck on metaphysical debates (is AI conscious?), we should treat personhood as a flexible bundle of obligations (rights & responsibilities) that societies confer.