Rights for autonomous artificial agents?

The fast-growing literature on agent technologies is truly gigantic; for introductions, see M.J. Wooldridge, Reasoning about Rational Agents, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2000, and N.R. Jennings and M.J. Wooldridge, Eds., Agent Technology: Foundations, Applications and Markets, Springer Verlag, 1998.

See http://www.hhs.state.tx.us/consolidation/IE/TIERS.shtml

The Proceedings of the International Conferences on Artificial Intelligence and Law (http://www.iaail.org/past-icail-conferences/index.html), and the journal Artificial Intelligence and Law are rich sources of information on these systems.

A very good source of material on the legal issues generated by the increasing use of artificial agents may be found at the Law and Electronic Agents Workshops site: http://www.lea-online.net/pubs

Halsbury's Laws of England (4th edition) Vol. 9 paragraph 203; c.f. Restatement (Second) of Contracts, § 3

There is a large amount of literature in this area; some very good treatments of the contracting problem may be found in: T. Allan and R. Widdison, "Can computers make contracts?", Harvard Journal of Law and Technology 9 (1996), 25--52,; A. Bellia Jr., "Contracting with electronic agents," Emory Law Journal 50, 4 (2001), 1063; I. Kerr, "Ensuring the success of contract formation in agent-mediated electronic commerce," Electronic Commerce Research 1, (2001), 183--202; E. Weitzenboeck, "Electronic agents and the formation of contracts", International Journal of Law and Information Technology 9, 3 (2001), 204--234. Various international trade agreements such as those formulated by the UNCITRAL or national legislations such as the UCITA have not as yet resulted in clarity in these areas.

S. Chopra and L. White, "Artificial agents---Personhood in law and philosophy," in Proceedings of the European Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2004 and S. Chopra and L. White, A Legal Theory for Autonomous Artificial Agents, University of Michigan Press, to be published.