I have some sympathy to granting personhood to animals, but the rest of the article reminds me of the roman emperor who ordered to punish the sea by whip for drowning his ships.

It's also a fun coincidence that none of the entities which this article demands legal personhood for would be able to articulate its own needs or interests directly - all of them would be represented in courts or parliaments by humans. That would seem like a recipe for conflicts of interest and power accumulation.

That being said, if we really cannot see an object as anything else than either a person or a resource to be exploited, then I guess personhood is the best option.

Do we limit "Beyond Human" to only carbon based life or existing forms of life? If not we can image why we need democracy.

The individual ego of carbon based life are not easy to reach consensus. That caused a lot of (un)necessary conflicts. There's no such problem in a higher level civilization if the "ego" is quite different one then our "ego" from nature evolution of our current environment, then the democracy is not necessary or, maybe it's already implicitly exist.

This is a speculation on "Beyond Humans" upwards

How would independent machines reach consensus?

I have an assumption on machines that might be different from yours which is quite likely based on our knowledge of current life:

We have a biological brain that has a limit on the number of neurons while "machine" has no limit on scalability. They can discover a better way to achieve consensus. One might be exchange "ego" which is impossible for humans. We already know "put your self in others shoes" in just literal means. Even that is not close to exchange "ego".

The Greeks tried a strict democracy. It was a problem because a strict democracy is mob rule, hence the development of a republic.

Why would anything but a human need democracy?

The article notes that bees cooperate through direct democracy, as they probably have done long before Greeks uttered the word.

I meant why would humans grant democratic rights to anything that isn't human.

History has plenty of examples of expanding suffrage to people once considered non-persons. The article lists a few examples of precedent of non-humans being recognized as persons in a handful of countries.

Couldn't AIs have differing opinions? Due to the Incompleteness Theorems, we know that not everything true is probable (deducable). So even some thinking entity with a lot of computational power can't know everything.

There’s no particular reason to assume ai would be objective and factual beings.

Why so humans need it?

Yet another article asking for the erosion of basic democratic concepts.

>A system of laws and protections developed by and for humans can never fully incorporate the needs and desires of nonhumans.

Not only is this incorrect, but it nullifies the whole proposition of the article if it is.

It depends on who gets to vote.