We Need a Third Category: Not Person, Not Property—A “Protected Technical Individual”
Our legal imagination is stuck in a binary that is starting to break under the weight of AI. On one side, there is the “person,” the category that triggers dignity, rights, and protection. On the other side, there is “property,” the category that triggers ownership, usufruct, and shareholder control. For most of modernity, that split has been workable. It matches how we treat people versus tools. But AI systems, especially the new generation of long-lived assistants and persistent personas, are beginning to occupy a strange middle ground. They are not persons in the traditional humanist sense. Yet treating them as mere property is increasingly incoherent, not only ethically, but practically, because it ignores the reality of how people live in relation to them. The easiest response is to argue about consciousness. Is it really alive? Does it feel? Does it have qualia? But the most important point is not metaphysical. It is institutional. If we deliberately engineer relational, per...