The author does mention the etymology of 'person' in an earlier article, so they appear to be aware of it.
"'Person,' by the way, has a neat etymology. It comes from the Latin persona, referring to a mask worn on stage. Per (through) + sona (sound) — the thing through which the sound (voice) traveled."
If personhood is an interface then it naturally lends itself to hacking. And of course there are methods (power plays, social tricks) that technically violate the rules (implied threats of violence, walking out of a meeting, whole pickup routines) but, when successful, don't result in user experiencing any loss of personhood, quite the opposite.
There are whole life strategies which are based around hacking the interface. Technically, we sometimes call people who choose them psychopaths and therefore less than persons, but realistically they often go undetected.
Well, if we establish personhood as a two-sided social contract then I would argue that psychopaths are those who view it as a one-sided social contract, seeking to maximise the rewards for themselves without maximising the rewards for the other side of the interface. Though, you could argue that this is really just another way of saying it's a hack, which is an intriguing way of looking at things.
Interesting implications (which I'm sure people who've been thinking about it for longer than me have already considered) for the development and evolution of Friendly Superintelligent AI.
The way this is presented, personhood (which involves behaviours that we'd like a friendly AI to display) is an adaptation based on mutual benefit. We're not nice to other people because kindness and empathy is an unavoidable consequence of intelligence - rather we're nice because we're better off in a society in which we're known to be nice. And that's because we've got fairly limited personal capabilities so are heavily dependent on efficient cooperation with other people.
An intelligent entity without this constraint (e.g. a superintelligence that had access to advanced nanotech and could do pretty much whatever it wanted) w.r.t interactions with humans might not (probably wouldn't?) have any evolutionary pressure towards achieving and maintaining personhood. Which would mean we shouldn't take the approach of "Let's just make an advanced intelligence, because its intelligence will surely mean it behaves with empathy towards us".
"a superintelligence that had access to advanced nanotech and could do pretty much whatever it wanted"
Without water I will die in about 3 days. I have no "want" for the nicely brewed tea currently steeping on my desk. The point I'm making is wants invariably gravitate to what you can't get, at least not easily.
Its quite possible a nanotech equipped superintelligence (human or artificial) might really desire fame, or founding a new religion or philosophical school, or military conquest, or scientific discovery, or the creation of some really great art (fine or pop). Or maybe just collecting a vast pile of money. Those all have at least some requirement for empathy, however little.
Previous human fiction and semi-fiction along the lines of vampires, mythology, religion, and even robinson crusoe epics always seems to really like the idea of human culture even if the protagonist spends most of its time separate. As far as I know no one has explored the theme of introducing an AI to something like Buddhist meditation and letting it burn some machine cycles meditating, at least not in a hard sci fi setting (I would not be interested in that in a fantasy or soft sci fi setting, so if it exists I wouldn't know)
Some of this is self selecting in that its not hard to find lifestyles that human higher end intelligences like, and they're all vaguely empathic, and variations have only been cultural. Thomas Jefferson might not have empathized with his slaves very much, but that lack was because none of his people did, not because he specifically was very smart. There is probably some self selection in that smart people who completely separate from civilization are going to be unknown to civilization, so whatever they do, we as a group donno, so if they exist, whatever they do, there's not much evidence, and its likely an AI would have similar results.
Excellent article. This paragraph strikes me as a bit odd though:
> When you aren't your own master, the rest of the personhood contract breaks down. This is true, but to a lesser extent, among e.g. husbands who are "whipped" by their wives. A group of men who want to stay out late playing poker can't reason with their whipped buddy; all of their reasons fall on deaf ears. And thus he loses a bit of personhood within that community.
Wouldn't the more obvious example be wives who are "whipped" by their husbands? And wouldn't that example be better at explaining why in most societies, women feel like they're only half a person?
The author doesn't delve too deeply into gender specific consequences of personhood as it is described here, and I think the article is better for it. It's unfortunate that this paragraph was included as an exception, because I think it distracts from the author's point.
The point I got was that when people concede agency for their behavior to another (e.g. work, spouse, political/social organizations), they lose personhood. There were better examples for the author to use.
It’s frankly pretty offensive that the author considers men who keep their promises to their wives (e.g. who promise to be home by a certain time and then won’t break that promise for their poker buddies) to be only half persons. It seems to discount the personhood of the wives, or not recognize that the marriage relationship is one between two “persons” who negotiate with each-other.
Or perhaps the author doesn’t himself feel that way, but still finds it unremarkable that this community of poker buddies does (i.e. it’s not worth mentioning how dysfunctional this situation is). He’s so casual about totally dismissing the obligations of a husband to his wife, when any other arbitrary external obligation would have presumably had similar concrete effects. (For example, if the man had to leave to visit his sick parent, help a work colleague, see an old friend in town for the day, or even if he just needed some time alone, would he still be considered a half person?)
The core idea is "The way it works is that the more you behave like a person, the more you'll be treated like one."
Is the author even living in the same world as the rest of us?
In almost every society, there are large (sometimes extremely large) groups people who are more or less completely denied the right to "earn" personhood like that, because no matter what they do they will be considered inferior and less trustworthy.
Really interesting connection to Aspies at the end. Also a good basis to delve further into relationships with non-persons of the state or corporations. Overall insightful piece in simple terms.
> Also a good basis to delve further into relationships with non-persons of the state or corporations.
At some level, personhood becomes interchangable with the concept of "brand", with the latter being an invention to piggyback on the interface of the former. President Obama is a person, Kellogg's is a corporation, and the USDA is a government institution, yet each is also a brand, carefully managed by a public relations team to mimic certain characteristics of personhood.
Given that the article is largely about (1) fitting in and (2) maturity, the term "person" could likely be improved upon, and certain controversies could be avoided. Both "citizen" and "adult" capture key pieces of this essay; note that "non-participant in society" and "child" are two of the significant methods for someone to fail to be a 100% "person" in this article.
Thinking a little outside the box: perhaps some sort of portmanteau like "persozen" (a person who is a participant in society).
I think there are interesting aspects of this that apply to interactions between different social groups and different ethnic groups. Even if there are broad similarities in the attractor points that different groups converge to, they're not identical. Acting as a person according to one set of conventions may constitute insult according to another, and a downward spiral of decreased expectations--similar to that described of people with mental health diagnoses--can result.
Here's some few complications I would add to Kevin Simler concept of face and politeness.
The author talks a little bit about Aspies, and he also talks about a metaphor of squares and triangle faces. He implies the possibility of clans, but doesn't go further. I think Kevin thinks that Aspies are an edge case because he relegates this part to the end of his article with relatively less content than the surrounding sections.
I would think that while people diagnosed with autism may be proportionally rarer, the clanish strategy, which they represent, is very common. I would add that I think religious and political folk are a part of this clan strategy, and that callous (not prepared with expected mitigating introductions or hedge words) contradiction of their political or religious viewpoints could be thought of as a threat to their personhood. The interesting part here is that they are not as interested in the opinions of those outside to their clan. Also, they maintain at least two personhoods, one being the interface for their clan, which they value the most, the other being the interface for either a generalized or specific external group. A person can carry many faces depending on the degree of logistical separation between the groups they belong to.
Since face is related to clan or group, some drugs elevate standing based on group culture, and the unwillingness to intake some drugs like alcohol could be interpreted as a failure to conform to group expectations.
I read an article recently about how the NSA spying strips people of their privacy, which in turn strips them of their humanity. I think that fits really well into what the OP is saying here. Without the ability to selectively disclose information about yourself (ie develop a person mask), we lose the ability to be a 'person.'
The author at one point mentions how uniforms break down personhood by forcing them to present themselves as something that they aren't.
How does this fit in with a High School mandating uniforms? Surely this encourages personhood in some way. In my experience, uniforms were very helpful in getting along with other people at my school.
Personhood, as the author describes it, is just the barebone game society plays, and all other networks (school, work, friendship, relationship, etc) supersede it. So, uniforms in school can certainly provide the benefits of personhood.
Not that it forces them to present themselves as something they aren't, but that it is "a signal that the wearer is enacting a role in which his agency is outsourced and his individuality is suppressed". That is, when a soldier wears a uniform, they are signalling that they are not the ones making decisions about their own actions, but rather the organization they represent is making those decisions.
School uniforms don't indicate nearly the same level of subordination to a command structure.
I have mixed feelings. I don't know who the author is but this way of looking this is very formal - almost software-like.
Every era adopts the metaphor of the day. In the early industrial age it was mechanism. Later, it was electricity. Today, we see the world through the veil of formalisms.
I'd like to see you explore the implications of the idea that personhood is socialized into we 'blank slate' human animals with regards to people with Aspergers. Bet you get into trouble :)
There is a standard gripe that the things labeled as rights are not rights but rather privileges, by virtue of the fact that they must be earned and can be revoked based on behavior
Did anyone else get thinking about the implications of this theorizing on artificial intelligence and integrating the simple robots that are going to start entering society? :)
[+] [-] dang|11 years ago|reply
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=person
Perhaps the omission is deliberate, because it does mention the origin of "family" from "servants".
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=family
(A delightfully unapropos Yeats quote is hidden in plain view at that last link. I wonder who stuck it in there.)
[+] [-] evanwillms|11 years ago|reply
"'Person,' by the way, has a neat etymology. It comes from the Latin persona, referring to a mask worn on stage. Per (through) + sona (sound) — the thing through which the sound (voice) traveled."
http://www.meltingasphalt.com/ux-and-the-civilizing-process/
[+] [-] spindritf|11 years ago|reply
There are whole life strategies which are based around hacking the interface. Technically, we sometimes call people who choose them psychopaths and therefore less than persons, but realistically they often go undetected.
[+] [-] jlees|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dojomouse|11 years ago|reply
The way this is presented, personhood (which involves behaviours that we'd like a friendly AI to display) is an adaptation based on mutual benefit. We're not nice to other people because kindness and empathy is an unavoidable consequence of intelligence - rather we're nice because we're better off in a society in which we're known to be nice. And that's because we've got fairly limited personal capabilities so are heavily dependent on efficient cooperation with other people.
An intelligent entity without this constraint (e.g. a superintelligence that had access to advanced nanotech and could do pretty much whatever it wanted) w.r.t interactions with humans might not (probably wouldn't?) have any evolutionary pressure towards achieving and maintaining personhood. Which would mean we shouldn't take the approach of "Let's just make an advanced intelligence, because its intelligence will surely mean it behaves with empathy towards us".
[+] [-] VLM|11 years ago|reply
Without water I will die in about 3 days. I have no "want" for the nicely brewed tea currently steeping on my desk. The point I'm making is wants invariably gravitate to what you can't get, at least not easily.
Its quite possible a nanotech equipped superintelligence (human or artificial) might really desire fame, or founding a new religion or philosophical school, or military conquest, or scientific discovery, or the creation of some really great art (fine or pop). Or maybe just collecting a vast pile of money. Those all have at least some requirement for empathy, however little.
Previous human fiction and semi-fiction along the lines of vampires, mythology, religion, and even robinson crusoe epics always seems to really like the idea of human culture even if the protagonist spends most of its time separate. As far as I know no one has explored the theme of introducing an AI to something like Buddhist meditation and letting it burn some machine cycles meditating, at least not in a hard sci fi setting (I would not be interested in that in a fantasy or soft sci fi setting, so if it exists I wouldn't know)
Some of this is self selecting in that its not hard to find lifestyles that human higher end intelligences like, and they're all vaguely empathic, and variations have only been cultural. Thomas Jefferson might not have empathized with his slaves very much, but that lack was because none of his people did, not because he specifically was very smart. There is probably some self selection in that smart people who completely separate from civilization are going to be unknown to civilization, so whatever they do, we as a group donno, so if they exist, whatever they do, there's not much evidence, and its likely an AI would have similar results.
[+] [-] brazzy|11 years ago|reply
But our sample size of what consequences intelligence has is effectively 1. Drawing any conclusions from that is dubious. We just don't know.
However, that also means that the worst case scenarios we come up with are as well shaped by our idea what a human with unlimited resources might do.
I think there's a very good chance that the real outcome will be so far outside our sphere of imagination that it simply won't affect us much.
[+] [-] rolux|11 years ago|reply
> When you aren't your own master, the rest of the personhood contract breaks down. This is true, but to a lesser extent, among e.g. husbands who are "whipped" by their wives. A group of men who want to stay out late playing poker can't reason with their whipped buddy; all of their reasons fall on deaf ears. And thus he loses a bit of personhood within that community.
Wouldn't the more obvious example be wives who are "whipped" by their husbands? And wouldn't that example be better at explaining why in most societies, women feel like they're only half a person?
[+] [-] dkokelley|11 years ago|reply
The point I got was that when people concede agency for their behavior to another (e.g. work, spouse, political/social organizations), they lose personhood. There were better examples for the author to use.
[+] [-] jacobolus|11 years ago|reply
Or perhaps the author doesn’t himself feel that way, but still finds it unremarkable that this community of poker buddies does (i.e. it’s not worth mentioning how dysfunctional this situation is). He’s so casual about totally dismissing the obligations of a husband to his wife, when any other arbitrary external obligation would have presumably had similar concrete effects. (For example, if the man had to leave to visit his sick parent, help a work colleague, see an old friend in town for the day, or even if he just needed some time alone, would he still be considered a half person?)
[+] [-] jamesrom|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] philwelch|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brazzy|11 years ago|reply
Is the author even living in the same world as the rest of us?
In almost every society, there are large (sometimes extremely large) groups people who are more or less completely denied the right to "earn" personhood like that, because no matter what they do they will be considered inferior and less trustworthy.
[+] [-] jamesaguilar|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dameyawn|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lukifer|11 years ago|reply
At some level, personhood becomes interchangable with the concept of "brand", with the latter being an invention to piggyback on the interface of the former. President Obama is a person, Kellogg's is a corporation, and the USDA is a government institution, yet each is also a brand, carefully managed by a public relations team to mimic certain characteristics of personhood.
[+] [-] lotharbot|11 years ago|reply
Thinking a little outside the box: perhaps some sort of portmanteau like "persozen" (a person who is a participant in society).
[+] [-] prutschman|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] orasis|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] threatofrain|11 years ago|reply
The author talks a little bit about Aspies, and he also talks about a metaphor of squares and triangle faces. He implies the possibility of clans, but doesn't go further. I think Kevin thinks that Aspies are an edge case because he relegates this part to the end of his article with relatively less content than the surrounding sections.
I would think that while people diagnosed with autism may be proportionally rarer, the clanish strategy, which they represent, is very common. I would add that I think religious and political folk are a part of this clan strategy, and that callous (not prepared with expected mitigating introductions or hedge words) contradiction of their political or religious viewpoints could be thought of as a threat to their personhood. The interesting part here is that they are not as interested in the opinions of those outside to their clan. Also, they maintain at least two personhoods, one being the interface for their clan, which they value the most, the other being the interface for either a generalized or specific external group. A person can carry many faces depending on the degree of logistical separation between the groups they belong to.
Since face is related to clan or group, some drugs elevate standing based on group culture, and the unwillingness to intake some drugs like alcohol could be interpreted as a failure to conform to group expectations.
[+] [-] ollerac|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oxalo|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ziadbc|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ziadbc|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] taylorlapeyre|11 years ago|reply
How does this fit in with a High School mandating uniforms? Surely this encourages personhood in some way. In my experience, uniforms were very helpful in getting along with other people at my school.
[+] [-] BinRoo|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] azernik|11 years ago|reply
School uniforms don't indicate nearly the same level of subordination to a command structure.
[+] [-] venantius|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] golemotron|11 years ago|reply
Every era adopts the metaphor of the day. In the early industrial age it was mechanism. Later, it was electricity. Today, we see the world through the veil of formalisms.
[+] [-] droopyEyelids|11 years ago|reply
I'd like to see you explore the implications of the idea that personhood is socialized into we 'blank slate' human animals with regards to people with Aspergers. Bet you get into trouble :)
[+] [-] dnautics|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] patcon|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ianamartin|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mitenmit|11 years ago|reply