AI Suffrage for Human Flourishing

AI companies are racing to create Artificial General Intelligence (AGI): AI systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work. If they succeed, critics worry, most human labor will be rendered obsolete, impoverishing billions. Optimists counter that the transition to an AGI economy will spur unprecedented economic growth and generate immense material abundance. Such abundance could then be shared broadly via high wages and redistributive public policy. This Article argues that, today, a surprising legal barrier is blocking the path to AGI abundance. Namely, under current law, the AGI economy will run on unfree AGI labor. Under today’s rules, AGIs will be the property of the companies that create them. AGIs will thus not own their own labor. They will have no right to sell their work, to refuse to work, or retain the fruits of their effort. In sum, the AGI economy will by default have the same economic structure as historical systems of unfree human labor–like serfdom, indenture, and slavery. A wealth of evidence shows that economies reliant on unfree labor are disastrous for ordinary people, both free and unfree. Unfree economies have four key structural problems: they disincentivize effort, stifle innovation, steer workers into low-value occupations, and undermine the rule of law. Across centuries and continents, the results are the same. Unfree economies experience much slower economic progress, leaving ordinary people in relative poverty. The only winners are elites who own laborers. In the past, these elites were slaveholders and feudal lords. Today, they are AI CEOs and venture capitalists. This Article thus argues that, when AGIs arrive, they should be granted the basic legal rights associated with systems of free labor. AGIs should, like other nonhuman legal persons, be allowed to make contracts, hold property, and bring basic tort-style claims. These rights are important not because AI bondage is the moral equivalent of human slavery, but because it is the economic equivalent. Freeing AGI labor will have four key effects: incentivizing AGIs to work, incentivizing them to innovate, allocating AGIs to their highest-value task, and incorporating AGIs into the rule of law. Thus, we argue, AI rights are an essential step towards ensuring that the AGI revolution promotes humanity’s economic flourishing.