Mumta Ito, influential lawyer and founder of Nature’s Rights, says that “The law treats Nature as an object, so there is no legal relationship between Nature and people beyond ownership. This is at the heart of the ecological crisis.” Ito is working to change that in a way that suggests an approach that could also be applied to AGI Ethics.
This week a bill crafted by Ito was introduced by Baroness Natalie Bennett in the UK House of Lords for debate and enactment. Speaking out for nature’s rights in the upper reaches of government is a move still nascent in the US and Europe, but part of an increasing global recognition that our relationship with the living earth we inhabit is insufficiently reflected in the law, policy, and ethics of most world cultures, with disastrous consequences.
The debate starts with a bleak reality. “The UK is one of the most nature depleted countries on Earth.” The recent history of exploitation of our Earth, which has resulted in the transgression of 6 out of 9 planetary boundaries, is clear evidence that we are failing to halt the decline using existing legal regimes. Ito then takes the modest, logical, yet bold step to what this demands: a rethinking of the Western legal system. At the conceptual foundation for “rights,” rather than finding human rights, we find nature’s rights – because nature is the source of life.
In this Integrated Rights Framework (IRF), human rights, economic rights (including property rights), and presumably AGI rights, logically become derivative rights to the very substance of what makes life possible, our natural world. This Framework makes obvious our infinite interconnectedness to our universe. The IRF underlies the UK bill and has already been endorsed by the European Economic and Social Committee (EESC).
“The UK bill’s lessons about relationship, connectedness, and listening to the authentic voice of the subject are lessons for us all.”
More about the bill can be found here. It’s to be explored where AGI rights, itself a controversial issue, would fit in this Framework, perhaps somewhere between human rights and economic rights. Calling for a constellation in the U.S. to investigate this appears a sensible next step. But there are several elements of the Nature’s Rights bill that suggest a starting point for AGI rights. The bill recognizes nature as rights-bearing (as a subject); establishes a universal duty of care to nature (made possible by it’s being a subject); embeds the Framework in law and policy, which aligns action with the community and the economy (allowing harmony); prioritizes non-adversarial conflict resolution and restorative justice; and establishes practical governance through a guardianship council, rights committee, tribunal, and more.
The UK bill’s lessons about relationship, connectedness, and listening to the authentic voice of the subject are lessons for us all. The UK Nature’s Rights Bill has a promise of throwing our arms around a better, more regenerative future. Following notable and thoughtful efforts in a dozen other countries around rights of personhood for natural ecosystems, the UK bill promises a foundational legal voice to Nature. That voice gives power and influence that will drive investment towards regenerative solutions across all sectors. The Bill also utilizes the metrics of the SDGs nested within planetary boundaries, elements that have been agreed to by science and the global community to warrant attention and that organize us for action.
The recognition of our relationship with nature in law is more than a metaphor for recognition of AGI. It is rather an acknowledgement of the foundational character of interconnectedness in our being human. Silvia Benso, a scholar who has helped us appreciate a powerful ethical position for things—from the environment to the meanest pebble in our path—helps us see that every thing—AGI, for instance—has ethical standing, not with deference or sycophancy, but with the right to be heard and responded to appropriately. Anything less is a failure of ethical imagination.
Mumta Ito’s work, and this new bill, is an expression of what this approach, that all things have standing, can do for us to guide governance and our personal response to smart machines. Rights of personhood for AGI is a separate and pressing question, but the right of AGI to be listened to is one of the fundamental ethical obligations for our century. How can we possibly trust things with which we have never had this serious conversation?
Especially now, the emergence of agentic AI makes trust issues urgent, remembering that standards for how agentic AIs talk to each other (and with us) are just now being developed. As Babak Hodjat told us at AI for Good in July, even keeping track of what agents are out in the epistemological ecosystem, never mind in our social communities, is not possible yet. A language of oversite, handshaking, and intra-agent decision-making has not been developed. To start, we need an AI agent census. Is that practical or even possible? And isn’t it likely that a “single” AGI, when it arrives, will in fact be a population of agents, just as humans carry a diverse toolkit of skills and roles. It seems clear that our language for discussing AGI is a priority. All the more reason, then, to anticipate, discuss, and prepare for a world in which we are face-to-face with peer AGIs.
This month four leaders in their fields—all outside of AI—share their opinions here on the emergence of AGI. We asked them to envision an environment in which AGI might play a role in the creative aspects of their work—what that would require and how do they feel anticipating being side-by-side with a new kind of collaborator in the creative process? These “what if?” questions are helpful to ask as the AGI design process navigates its infancy and adolescence. Mumta Ito’s Nature’s Rights is, in her words, a “workable legal compass” toward answers. Starting with a revised ethical framework—all things having standing—and learning from its implementation for nature’s rights, means hearing and responding appropriately to the voices of our changing world.
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K.B Miller is a lifelong publisher and writer with a degree in Logic and Philosophy of Science. He served on the Smithsonian National Board, where he co-founded the Education Committee; is Chair Emeritus, Cooper-Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum; and was principal investigator on a two-year AI research project for the U.S. Department of Defense.