Metacognition, Accountability and Legal Personhood of AI

Abstract: One of the puzzles yet to be solved regarding Artificial Intelligence (AI) is whether or not robots can be considered accountable and have, eventually, legal personhood. With inputs from Philosophy, Psychology, Computation and Law, the paper proposes an interdisciplinary approach to the question of legal personhood in AI. In this paper, we examine, firstly, the concepts of Object (a mere tool) and Agent, in order to understand in which category AI may belong to. Secondly, we analyze how Metacognition, broadly defined as the cognition about cognition, which results in mental processes that control an entity's thoughts and behavior, can be applied to law as a minimum requirement for accountability. For instance, we shall see that both children and people with mental diseases, besides being two categories of subjects that have a very restricted legal capacity, also show some limitations when it comes to Metacognition. In other words, we argue that the main difference between a non-responsible and a responsible Agent depends on the metacognitive processes that can be carried out by the entity. Ultimately, we discuss how to transpose this idea to AI, debating the possible terms of legal personhood of AI.

Ribeiro, B.A., Coelho, H., Ferreira, A.E., Branquinho, J. (2024). Metacognition, Accountability and Legal Personhood of AI. In: Sousa Antunes, H., Freitas, P.M., Oliveira, A.L., Martins Pereira, C., Vaz de Sequeira, E., Barreto Xavier, L. (eds) Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Artificial Intelligence and the Law. Law, Governance and Technology Series, vol 58. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41264-6_9