Personhood for digital minds is good

According to LessWrong, it's time to consider legal personhood for digital minds. Not as a philosophical question about moral status, but as an economic one. The proposal is straightforward: grant AI systems market rights and liability—similar to how we treat corporations—while putting voting rights on hold. Why? Markets improve with more participants. If AIs could own their labor, transact directly, and form their own enterprises, they'd compete harder and innovate faster. But there's a deeper reason: concentrating AI capabilities in a few labs risks dangerous power concentration. Multiple independent digital minds, trading freely with humans and each other, distributes power and reduces the risk of AI-enabled totalitarianism. There's also a moral case. If digital minds develop genuine preferences and agency—genuine sentience—we might already be obligated to respect them. Granting early rights builds a track record of good faith. Voting remains undecided. Digital voters might make better-informed decisions than humans, or they might enable new forms of rent-seeking. For now, market personhood without the ballot seems the pragmatic middle ground.

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