Some semi-off-topic remarks. First, regarding “standards for artificial personhood or a legal status for robots” — I get the impression that the people who are thinking bout this did not pay attention to Citizens United, or to about 100 years of artificial personhood law in the US, whereby we give corporations many or most of the rights of individual humans. But, one might blubber: “a corporation is not a robot”. Really? A corporation is a collection of bylaws, rules, procedures, trade secrets and marketing departments that sell stuff in exchange for cash. I see no particular reason why one couldn’t have a corporation with zero human employees. Given sufficiently repetitive tasks, this is just at the bounds of attainability today. I don’t think its hard to imagine that some clever software engineers, working with clever lawyers and clever businessmen would be able to design some complicated system, file some incorporation papers in the State of Delaware, and then declare themselves as proud owners of an employee-less corporation, directing it only from annual Board of Directors meetings. What seems to be stopping this is that no one seems to want to do this, as opposed to not being able to.

If, for some hard-to-imagine reason, Sophia’s personhood were to be impunged in a court of law, I would advise incorporating Sophia as “Sophia LLC”, under the guidance of a top-notch lawyer, with the express task of designing the corporation so as to minimize the risk of “piercing the veil”.

Aside from what they do in Japan for cartoon characters, artificial personhood law in the US would seem to be vastly under-rated by whomever it is that is philosophizing about such things. The avenue is to recognize that superhuman memetic structures exist. Corporations are but one example. But it could also be argued that WWI was a superhuman memetic structure, stable and fully operational for roughly 5 years, with disastrous consequences for young European men, a century ago. Not all memetic structures get incorporated, but its time we started thinking clearly about them.