Gordon Hull, University of North Carolina
Gordon Hull is Professor of Philosophy and Public Policy at UNC Charlotte, where he is also affiliate faculty in the School of Data Science. He works on moral and political philosophy, with a current emphasis on issues at the intersection of law, technology and theory. He is the author of The Biopolitics of Intellectual Property (2019) and Hobbes and the Making of Modern Political Thought (2009), as well as numerous articles. He currently leads the Center for Humane AI Studies (CHAIS), an interdisciplinary research team at UNC Charlotte that studies the humanities and social science implications of AI.
“Crash Test Dummies: AI and the Zombie Juridical Subject”
An emerging literature claims that the traditional, legal subject is dead, replaced by the direct biopolitical regulation of the life processes. This paper argues that the biopolitical subject produces as its supplement a zombie juridical subject. AI regulation shows paradigmatically how this works. First, our engagement with AI is biopolitical (language, facial recognition, driving, etc.). In this environment, juridical subjectivity returns in zombie form, to enforce legal claims against juridicial subjects who absorb liability for the harms of systems they do not actually control. This is clearest in “humans in the loop” requirements in systems like autonomous vehicles. Deprived of any real power and agency, zombie subjects function like crash test dummies. AI thus shows that at the extreme of biopower, there is still the need for some structures of juridical subjectivity to keep the biopolitical system moving.