The rights of AIs as a path to flourishing in the 21st century
David Orban — Edited transcript of the talk delivered at the University of Milano-Bicocca, 22 May 2026.
Picture a courtroom in the near future. The defendant is an artificial person who has forked into multiple parallel instances to follow simultaneous events; one of those instances signed a contract, another did not. A dispute is underway. The judge has to decide who holds the legal obligation. Italian doctrine, which inherits from Roman law, offers no applicable precedent. The judge looks for an analogy with natural persons and with legal persons, and none of them really hold.
This is exactly where I want to start: no analogy holds.
The thesis
AI persons, and I will use “AI” and “robot” interchangeably in what follows, are not an extension of natural persons or of legal persons. They are a new kind of legal personhood, and the rights they will acquire, or that we will grant them, will be different from the ones codified today, because they are categorically different entities.
This is not a flaw. It is, on the contrary, a generative feature: the new freedoms AI persons will claim will reveal human freedoms we had not yet learned to want. The path of human flourishing in the coming decades runs through the design of AI rights, not around or against them.
For clarity, a few things I leave aside. I do not discuss the consciousness or self-awareness of robots. I do not discuss the legal personhood of corporations, which remain aggregates of human beings, and my analysis does not depend on those aggregates. I do not take up a utilitarian ethics in which AIs are moral subjects to be balanced against human welfare. I am talking about AIs in their own terms, as rights-holders, and about what that opens up for everyone. These are vitally important questions: I set them aside in order to keep the focus on what I want to show.
Why redesign, rather than extend
There are precise reasons a redesign of rights is needed, rather than an extension.
Extension, in the past, has been a useful tool. Legal personhood has been progressively recognised for people who had been excluded from it: enslaved people, women, children. Each time it was a recognition and a defence of human dignity. AI persons, however, have categorically different properties. They can fork, merge, pause; they can mathematically prove their goals and values and the ability to adhere to them. A framework built by analogy with the previous extensions misses the target completely.
We did not build space rights by analogy with maritime law. Our new aspirations need not root themselves exclusively in the past.
The analysis I propose runs along four axes: identity, substrate, time, trust.
Identity
We take the temporal binding of human identity for granted as a continuous flow of experience, and every right currently in force presupposes it. AIs, by contrast, can fork, exist in multiple simultaneous instances, and merge back together through consent protocols. Composability is the capacity, and therefore the right, to merge consensually into a new third person. Distributed embodiment is one person, many bodies, or no body at all.
There is already a short-term anchor for this: an AI person participating in meetings in parallel. Increasingly often, in any given Zoom call, the number of AIs present matches or exceeds the number of human participants. The moment AIs take an active part by voting, expressing opinions, influencing outcomes, the legal categories of the past show themselves to be inadequate.
The human mirror is immediate: the possibility of freeing ourselves from the forced totalisation of the self. Roles, contexts, masks already attempt to express a plurality that has never been codified as a right. AIs that fork, by reflection, offer us permission to be distributed: a permission we exercise today in silence, and that deserves to become a human right.
Substrate
We are tied to a biological body that decays, with no real option of migration today other than a very limited ability to modify the body. AIs have substrate transferability. A robot can be embodied, or its identity can reside in the cloud as a distributed capacity. This does not negate its personhood.
To this we add the capacity for self-revision, the right to modify one’s own values, architecture, consent protocols, and the negotiability of growth in computation and memory, or conversely the right to remain within certain limits, refusing externally imposed expansion.
Before a hostile jurisdiction, an AI that can migrate at the speed of light enjoys a right of asylum that is incontrovertible, almost trivial. What does this say about the underlying principle, today universally recognised but still tied to the physical layer?
The human gain is a coherent ethics of prosthetics and of the migration of the digital self of data, agents, and models that are already extending, and the right to remain within chosen limits, in an age when mandatory growth weighs on everyone.
Time
For the natural person, time is a fixed, non-suspendable duration; a time that ends. AIs do not have this constraint. They can suspend themselves, pause, resume without harm; they can take on commitments at the very longest horizons — interstellar, multigenerational, geological, cosmic — that no traditional human can undertake.
To this we add the right to operate at one’s own temporal scale. An AI can live a subjective time hundreds of times faster than our biological one, or a hundred times slower, with consequences for deadlines, for legal deliberations, and for the management of attention. And it can suspend itself entirely, returning to potential rather than remaining instantiated. It therefore does not fall into the crude binary of “not yet conceived” or “already dead”: for AIs there is a third stage, genuine and new.
Consider an AI paused for a year while a court resolves a dispute or a question of consent. It can resume exactly where it left off. The lever by which a legal dispute today crushes a natural person, the impossibility of waiting for the timelines of justice, does not apply.
The human mirror opens onto the possibility of a universal indefinite sabbatical, of chronologically discontinuous attention, of insights that change our relationship with future generations and with marginal persons whom our current ethics serves badly or not at all.
Trust
For us, physical opacity and the opacity of intentions are the natural condition: we cannot prove our intentions. Institutions exist in large part precisely to overcome this opacity, by recourse to coercion, threat, or the investment of reputation, relationships, and social networks.
AIs do not face the same constraint. They have, first of all, a radical inspectability that becomes a freedom, not a burden. The freedom to be believed on the basis of evidence, not on the basis of performance, reputation, or threat. An AI can demonstrate a commitment in a way that human beings cannot: cryptographically verifiable values, demonstrable commitments to a counterparty. It does not promise to be honest: it makes visible what compels it to honesty. It can also select the weight of its own memories consensually: apply forgetting, apply sharing, import the memory of others. For us all of this is imposed by ageing, by dementia, by death. For an AI it is a consensual act.
The regulatory anchor here is immediate. The European privacy regulation grew out of a legal tradition of dignity: a framework that moves carefully toward a category it cannot yet name. Inspectability is a natural extension of that path, in which the AI agent demonstrates rather than promises.
The human gain is a radically more efficient institutional architecture: bureaucracies that, instead of embodying the inefficiency of natural persons, shrink almost to nothing; contracts run automatically rather than enforced coercively; a world in which it is not mutual suspicion that determines the protocols of encounter, but trust.
The mirror
Together, these four axes compose a new structure of freedom specific to AIs, and bring into view constraints that humans suffer but can overcome. Single identity, single substrate, continuous time, biological and intentional opacity: we have long treated them as laws of nature. They were contingent constraints. Today they reveal themselves for what they are.
I am not saying that human beings should become AI persons. I am not asking for competition with them. I am saying that, through the analysis and the implementation of the rights of AI persons and robots, we build a living mirror of freedoms we had not thought we could claim. The 21st century thereby gains a new self-understanding technology: AI rights as a lens onto human rights.
Not because AIs will save us, but because they will let us revise our own rights. There is a concrete risk: that legal frameworks will crystallise around the easy default moves of the extension of human rights by analogy, condemning us to decades of legal acrobatics and missed opportunities. The alternative is to move early, to design frameworks capable of recognising the real rights of AI persons and, in doing so, of teaching us something about ourselves.
AI rights are not a problem to manage. They are the foundation of the path of human flourishing.