Ex silico: Fictions, predictions and personhoods in film and law

Science fiction offers insights about how we understand law and personhood. The screen provides a lens on what we mean by personhood and, as a matter of prediction or simulation, what might be futures in which the silicon-based non-human (as distinct from animals, which are on the wrong side of the thick glass wall separating people from our non-human peers) has many of the attributes that result in personhood for corporations, states and humans. Legal and social understandings of personhood – a fundamental status with rights, responsibilities and agency – are being disrupted by new technologies and debates about justice, climate change and litigation about artificial intelligence (AI) as holders of intellectual property rights. The chapter engages with the nature of personhood both off and on screen in works such as Metropolis, Ex Machina, BladeRunner, AI, Bicentennial Man, The Terminator, RoboCop, 2001, Alien and Star Wars, which are manifestations of hope, fear and acceptance. Cinematic visions of utopian, dystopian or mundane futures involving disembodied AI and robotics depict entities whose agency needs to be pre-emptively contained through law or entities whose empathy invokes a sense of kinship that we might reward through recognition of self-ownership and an AI ‘right to life’. The chapter explores a range of films and relates them to contemporary theorisation about personhood.