Artificial general intelligence and contract

Abstract

The aim of this article is to inquire whether contract law can operate in a state of affairs in which artificial general intelligence (AGI) exists and has the cog-nitive abilities to interact with humans to exchange promises or otherwise en-gage in the sorts of exchanges typically governed by contract law. AGI is a long way off but its emergence may be sudden and come in the lifetimes of some people alive today. How might contract law adapt to a situation in which at least one of the contract parties could, from the standpoint of capacity to engage in promising and exchange, be an AGI? This is not a situation in which AI operates as an agent of a human or a firm, a frequent occurrence right now. Rather, the question is whether an AGI could constitute a principal – a contract party on its own. Contract law is a good place to start a discussion about adapt-ing the law for an AGI future because it already incorporates a version of what is known as weak AI in its objective standard for contract formation and inter-pretation. Contract law in some limited sense takes on issues of relevance from philosophy of mind. AGI holds the potential to transform a solution to an epis-temological problem of how to prove a contract exists into solution to an onto-logical problem about the capacity to contract. An objection might be that con-tract law presupposes the existence of a person the law recognizes as pos-sessing the capacity to contract. Contract law itself may not be able to answer the prior question of legally recognized personhood. The answer will be to fo-cus on how AGI cognitive architecture could be designed for compatibility for human interaction. This article focuses on that question as well.