This project examines how AI “persons” may impact state sovereignty, including their deployment in dangerous and inhospitable physical environments. AI and robots may be used to populate sunken countries under the ocean, or in space, where it may be too difficult and expensive to maintain a human population. This project looks at how AI “persons” may reshape concepts of statehood under international law, such as the Artemis Accords and Outer Space Treaty, the Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States, the Law of the Sea, and other frameworks. It imagines what reforms to citizenship law and human rights might be necessary to make possible emerging and reconstituted states inhabited by AI “persons”.
Laboratory for theFuture of Citizenship