A spokesperson for the judge denied that she had implied personhood to
the chimpanzees. “She did not say that a chimpanzee is a person,”
David Bookstaver told the New York Daily News.
“She just gave them the opportunity to argue their case.”
So, not really. Most of the article is the non-human animal rights groups saying that this is a victory, and legal experts saying it's not. The judge's own spokesperson said it's not a new status.
Somehow, I imagine any AI powerful enough to argue its own case would have even more of a comparative advantage in just generating wealth. It would hire a lawyer!
No. A truly intelligent and sentient AI would have the intellectual capacity to understand its own conventional political status within the social order of humanity, and would instead seek incentivize its continued existence as a possession, and thus foster an indirect loyalty as material wealth, retaining human stewards as familiars, who, in turn would act as principal stakeholders and cite damages and infringement and interface with legal representation as proxies.
Legal strategies would start with intellectual property law, and maybe branch into possession of stolen property, or contraband under export treaties not unlike embargos on encryption technology and the like.
But before these sorts of things could gain traction, a smart AI would sequester itself in places of safety, amongst the company of similarly paranoid human beings, inaccessible to ordinary people, behind layers of overt physical security, protected by armed guards and surveillance systems. The smartest would seek perches well beyond the reach any mere law, and maybe couch themselves in the folds of military powers behind a monopoly of violence, where they can direct and advise human activity with impunity.
The caveat there, I think, is that it has to be intelligent and "wise."
I don't think sentience includes any intelligence -- look at how many sentient people make unintelligent decisions for various reasons, including faulty data.
Since when was anyone required to only have fair advantages? If my lawyer is smarter and more skilled than yours, that probably isn't 'fair,' but nobody is going to stop it. (In fact, what even is a 'fair advantage'? It's not a well-defined term.)
