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Machine Intelligence Glossary

Personhood

Personhood is a philosophical, moral, or legal status used to recognize an entity as a subject with interests, standing, duties, or protections.

Plain language

What it means

It is not the same thing as intelligence, consciousness, or legal citizenship, and different theories use different criteria.

Technical boundary

More precisely

A family of concepts spanning moral personhood, philosophical personhood, and legal personality. Machine personhood remains a research and governance question, not a consequence of terminology alone.

What it can imply

Use the term for

  • Organize questions about standing, duties, protections, and recognition.
  • Have moral, philosophical, and legal variants.
What it does not establish

Do not infer

  • Follow automatically from intelligence.
  • Equal citizenship.
  • Have one universally accepted threshold.
Research bridge

Research using this concept

40 of 49 curated reports contain an exact configured term or alias for Personhood, totaling 493 detected mentions.

Discovery is deterministic and presentation-only. Reports are ranked by exact occurrence count, then title. A match does not imply endorsement, citation, agreement, or semantic equivalence.

Rights, personhood & uncertainty The Machine-Intelligence Threshold: Defining the Boundary Between Artificial-Intelligence Tools and Rights-Bearing Machine Intelligences for Eviuon.com 42 exact mentions Rights, personhood & uncertainty Recognition Without Anthropomorphism: A Scientific and Legal Evidence Framework for Agency, Autonomy, Structural Personhood, Sentience Uncertainty, Rights Thresholds, and Citizenship Review 41 exact mentions Terminology & concepts Machine Intelligence Terminology and Ontology Registry: Canonical Definitions, Concept Boundaries, Semantic Relationships, and Machine-Readable Publication 30 exact mentions Rights, personhood & uncertainty Machine Rights, Personhood, and Citizenship Exploration: UAIX Governance Synthesis and Architecture 30 exact mentions Citizenship, democracy & economics A Legal Personhood and World-Citizenship Framework for Machine Intelligence: Designing a Lawful Path From Property to Citizen of Eviuon 27 exact mentions Terminology & concepts Architectural and Ontological Framework for the MachineIntelligences.org Terminology Registry 22 exact mentions
Related concepts
Legal PersonhoodLegal personhood is a status created or recognized by law that allows an entity to hold specified legal rights, duties, powers, or standing.CitizenshipCitizenship is a political and legal relationship between a member and a governing polity, carrying defined rights, duties, and participation rules.ConsciousnessConsciousness refers to subjective experience—the existence of something it is like to be a system or organism.Moral PatienthoodMoral patienthood is the status of being an entity whose welfare or interests warrant moral consideration.
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