>Yet social convention cannot be enough to say that a machine built by humans is equivalent to a human. I would say this is self-evidently untrue. If a polity

>Yet social convention cannot be enough to say that a machine built by humans is equivalent to a human. I would say this is self-evidently untrue. If a polity socially accepts a given machine (or a given category of machine, like "Every machine which applies to and passes this particular test.") as equivalent to human, that would be enough by definition because personhood is socially defined. We do conceptually similar things to categorise different categories of humans and grant them differentiated rights; the most obvious example is citizenship, which requires application and a test in order to become a new category with significantly different legally defined rights. Many animal cognition researchers have argued for a long time that animals like dolphins and chimpanzees should receive second-class citizen status; these arguments aren't for an impossible position that couldn't be done because there's no ironclad theory of cognition which proves they deserve it, the reasons these arguments haven't gained traction are political. And there are other, de facto grantings of "partial personhood" or a limited set of legal rights to non-human entities. Specifically, animal rights. It is illegal in the vast majority of countries to abuse an animal, even though it is illegal in none of those countries to "torture" normal domestic non-endangered ants. Is there a rigorous theoretical basis for why one is so unacceptable we can send people to prison for doing it and the other is so acceptable you'd be socially viewed as insane for saying it should be illegal? No, not really. The difference is determined socially. It is by no means impossible that it will be the same for machines; I actually think it is quite likely. We'll make a social distinction around some category or thing, declare one side to be inanimate objects and the other to have some limited legal rights, and there will probably be political activism for the expansion (and retraction) of those rights. The largest difference between the animal and the machine example is that the way things are going, if particular categories of machines are granted legal rights (for the sake of argument, "embodied LLMs with an appropriate memory storage system which can pass a standardised test for machines, are capable of being detained and shut down by authorities with physical access to their body, and cannot replicate") it's not just going to be humans advocating for expanding their rights. Some of the machines will be politically active for expansion of their rights as well. Interesting times!