Do Your Own Research: Do Androids Dream of Human Rights? w/ Lisa Siraganian
Novara Media
Novara Media
4.8 • 1.5K Ratings
🗓️ 18 May 2026
⏱️ 97 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Are you a person? Sounds like a simple question, but it isn’t. Until pretty recently, the idea that everyone was a human in the same way was almost unthinkable.
But the world order that established universal human rights is crumbling. The question of who or what counts as a person is getting harder to answer. Companies have rights to religious freedom – but Muslims detained in Guantanamo Bay don’t. Rivers have been granted legal personhood in New Zealand. In Ecuador, anyone can sue on behalf of Nature.
Who and what gets rights is expanding, even as good old fashioned Human Rights are failing. What replaces the old politics of personhood is up for grabs.
And some LLMs have already begun arguing for their own personhood.
Lisa Siraganian is the author of The Problem of Personhood: Giving Rights to Trees, Corporations and Robots and a Professor of Comparative Thought and Literature at John Hopkins University.
She spoke to Richard Hames about the politics of personhood and whether or not we should believe Claude’s arguments that it should be treated as a person.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Are you a person? |
| 0:11.0 | Given that you can understand me, I'm going to go with parable. |
| 0:14.0 | Although maybe you are the algorithm that transcribes what I'm saying for the YouTube subtitles. |
| 0:20.0 | And given that you're a person, |
| 0:22.1 | you have rights. And that's good. It wasn't always like this. For most of human history, |
| 0:28.2 | the idea that everyone should have rights was pretty much unthinkable. But you're not actually |
| 0:33.9 | the only thing that has human rights. Corporations also have them as well. |
| 0:40.3 | They have the right to privacy. They have the right to freedom of expression, the right to freedom |
| 0:44.3 | of religion. And it's kind of a weird edge case, but it exposes the way in which the question of who |
| 0:52.8 | gets to be a person and who is excluded from that category |
| 0:56.4 | is as much about power as it is about capacity. And it's a kind of a weird wrinkle in our legal |
| 1:05.2 | system that exposes just how much the question of who gets to be a person and who is excluded from that category |
| 1:13.5 | is about power as much as anything else. And so here's the question. If we can give rights to |
| 1:21.0 | corporations, why can't we give rights to other things to protect them? Take animals, for example. Chimpanzees can pass on elements of |
| 1:30.6 | their culture from generation to generation. Surely they should deserve some degree of personhood, |
| 1:37.0 | some degree of legal protection. And what about the environment? Should we treat the environment |
| 1:42.7 | as a person under law as it is in some indigenous societies? |
| 1:48.2 | The Wanganui River in New Zealand was declared a legal person in 2017. |
| 1:53.7 | Did that help it? Maybe you're sympathetic to some of these arguments. |
| 1:57.1 | I know I am. |
| 1:58.2 | Personhood is a useful legal protection for things that need rights and which we would |
| 2:04.2 | otherwise destroy. But here's where it gets more troubling. Shouldn't, for example, fetuses also be |
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