Review of: "[Essay] Not Quite Like Us? — Can Cyborgs and Intelligent Machines Be Natural Persons as a Matter of Law?" Stephen DeCanio 1 1 University of California, Santa Barbara Potential competing interests: No potential competing interests to declare. Gervais’ Essay “aims to situates [sic] the difference in law between human and machine in a way that a court of law could operationalize.” He acknowledges early on that the law can define almost anything to be a “person” (e.g., lakes, rivers, corporations) but he seeks to go beyond this truism to provide criteria for what constitutes a “human being.” This is no easy task, especially when considering the possibility of adding mechanical or electronic enhancements to human bodies. Leaving those hybrid cases aside, the crucial distinction to be made is between ordinary humans as they exist today and potential machine intelligences (AIs) that may come into existence in the future. Gervais’ Essay is grounded in a fundamentally materialistic metaphysics. With that starting point, it is indeed difficult to come up with a clear definition of what a “human being” is, because AIs potentially can exhibit any or all of the observable behaviors normally associated with humans – agency, creativity, interactivity, humor, and so forth. We already have built autonomous vehicles and weapons systems, and AIs surpass human capabilities in numerous cognitive and physical tasks. Gervais’ solution (or “working hypothesis”) is “that biology and the unique biologically-embodied mental abilities of humans are key pieces of the definitional line separating human and machine.” This may be adequate for courtroom work, but it would seem to beg the question of establishing the ontological status of AIs that can do most of the things human beings can do. Drawing a distinction between human beings and AIs entails metaphysics in a fundamental way. I would argue that the key difference cannot be framed in purely materialistic terms. Human beings have non-material souls. This assertion reaches beyond the task Gervais set for his Essay. Yet it has been lurking since the start of the modern literature on the possibility of intelligent machines. The founder of this literature, Alan Turing, argued in “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” (1950) for a kind of functional equivalence between AIs and humans based on the observational indistinguishability of their cognitive capabilities. He sharpened the question, “Can machines think?” to a thoroughly operational matter of whether a computer could successfully play an “imitation game.” Turing’s answer was positive. But in discussing a number of objections to this position he brought up the “theological objection” to the notion that computers can “think.” (Turing here used “think” as shorthand for the type of equivalence he was positing,) Thus, the Qeios, CC-BY 4.0 · Review, May 6, 2023 Qeios ID: 9GP4BQ · https://doi.org/10.32388/9GP4BQ 1/3