It’s been a while since I’ve written about the Nonhuman Rights Project, the group that is on a mission in state courts across the country to find some judge, somewhere, who will say that elephants are persons and are therefore entitled to petition for writs of habeas corpus. You can find my archive of prior posts here. Suffice it to say that so far, no court has gone bananas.

Let’s get caught up on recent decisions. A few weeks ago, the Pennsylvania Superior Court, an appellate court, affirmed the dismissal of a petition brought supposedly on behalf of several elephants at the Pittsburgh Zoo. It used unusually direct, but legally accurate, language:

Chattels have no right to the Great Writ.

And about a month earlier, the Michigan Supreme Court denied the NhRP’s motion for reconsideration of its earlier order denying leave to appeal a decision dismissing another petition.

There is also an upcoming case that will be heard next week in the Hawaii Supreme Court. The case is like all the others. We will see how it turns out. As in prior cases, there are amicus briefs on both sides of the issue.

And maybe most surprisingly, the NhRP has recently filed a habeas corpus petition not on behalf of elephants, but on behalf of beagles being held in what it says are cruel conditions in Wisconsin. The court, of course, dismissed the petition. The NhRP sought an injunction pending appeal, which the court denied on the grounds that there was no abuse of discretion because the lower court had “considered the relevant case law and concluded that dismissal of the appellants’ petition was warranted because habeas corpus does not extend to animals.”

You would think that the NhRP would be more keenly attuned to the slippery slope problem. It’s one thing to say that elephants or maybe chimapnzees or other great apes are exceptional and like human beings in many important respects. But if you assert that “beagles are persons,” then why not “tabby cats are persons” or “cows are persons”? I’m reminded about the story I told in 2015 about Lieutenant Bars, the defendant in a police brutality case who was a very bad boy.

I want to revisit a point I made at length in a 2023 post and that I first raised way back in 2018. The rapid development of AI, especially in the years since 2023, increase the risks that a judge will someday say that an elephant is a person. Why? It’s not because we come to think that elephants are “more like us.” It’s because we may come to think, in light of our exposure to the new technology, we are “less like us,” or more like machines. Or as Sam Altman tweeted a few years ago:

i am a stochastic parrot, and so r u.

And if that’s true, then what is the point of drawing a firm line between human beings and everything else? If we’re not moral persons, then why not open the door to elephants?

That to me seems to be one of the real dangers of AGI. It runs the risk of undermining our sense of our own moral and legal value. Instead of saying, “computers are people because they can do some of the wonderful things we can do,” which would be one kind of mistake, we might say, “people are just computers because the things that we can do can be done by computers.”

Let me bring in what could be regarded as either a lowbrow reference or a highbrow reference, depending on what you think about classic science fiction of the twentieth century. In Frank Herbert’s Dune, which takes place in the far future, the characters talk about a social upheaval that was in their distant past but our distant future, the “Butlerian Jihad.” In the Jihad, humanity destroyed all of their “thinking machines,” which had enslaved them. If there is ever a real Butlerian Jihad, I think it will happen because people revolt against the devaluation of humanity that the creation of AGI risks causing.