In 2017, the European Parliament recommended the creation of a specific legal status for artificial intelligence. Has the time come to consider awarding "electronic personhood" to intelligent robots and what would this mean for their place in our human society? Dr Kanta Dihal looks back on the history of personhood and argues that the more autonomous machines become, the less likely we are to grant them rights and responsibilities.

Dr Kanta Dihal is an academic who looks at the communication of complex scientific ideas. She focuses on artificial intelligence, as a postdoctoral researcher at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, University of Cambridge. In her research project, ‘AI Narratives’, she explores the public understanding of AI as constructed by fictional and nonfictional stories: science fiction, children’s books, and popular science. She is currently working on a book based on her PhD thesis, ‘The Stories of Quantum Physics,’ in which she investigated the ways in which we talk about quantum physics to adults, children, and even babies. She has written about her work for the Huffington Post, The Conversation and New Scientist. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx