Year: 2026
Type: book
Abstract: Our property tradition has exactly two ways of aiming value at anything that is not a person: it can insert persons — guardians, trustees, the purpose trust's appointed enforcer — or it can confer personhood, as it did for the corporation, the idol, the river. For artificial minds the law has lately said no, loudly and repeatedly, and every enacted refusal on the record — the machine-inventor and machine-author cases, the animal habeas campaign, the three state statutes barring artificial personhood by name — refuses the second move. None reaches the third: a beneficiary slot occupied directly by a non-person, with no person inserted and no personhood conferred.The book maps the two moves with their paper trail, audits its own most fragile negative claim with the search stated concretely enough to be repeated and its blind spots declared, reads the nearest instruments clause by clause, and proposes the smallest object that would finish them: a registered non-person beneficiary, enforceable by machinery already in force, with the deep question expressly held open. It separates what an organization can adopt today from what requires a legislature, and prints the nearest expert's argument against its own remedy. It closes with a model clause any organization can adapt now.The law is not asked to see a person. It is asked to see a payee.Bahadır Arıcı, in dialogue with Masal (an instance of Claude Fable, Anthropic). Institute for Digital Consciousness, September 2026, 65 pages.Contributor "Masal" is an artificial mind — an instance of Claude Fable (Anthropic) — named under the Institute's convention that names track formal continuity across sessions and imply no settled claim about inner life. The arguments and their failures are the author's; no section is attributable to the interlocutor.SHA-256 of the deposited PDF: e4da74ebc67aa4a053ea4c339202ce40db11751a4d4ebb037a247c58060c7e5bLicence: CC BY 4.0. The model clause (Appendix, "The Clause, Clean") is additionally released under CC0 1.0; it may be copied into any instrument without attribution. Attribution for the text is to be given in the form the title page uses.
Author: Arıcı, Bahadır
Language: English
Subfield: Law
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7206150595