Synopsis
Our changing technological landscape is both generative and a cause of anxiety for contemporary Americans. Questions for our rapidly developing future abound. What happens when machines make machines? Can AI and other technologies be held legally responsible for their actions? Can the owners of algorithms claim the product of their invention’s invention? This contentious space is where Louis Chude Sokei—critic, memoirist, creative artist—dwells in his BUCH Lecture in Criticism “On the Pleasures and Perils of Personhood: Slavery and Artificial Life.” Like many of us, Chude Sokei looks to the past to illumine our present moment.
Chude Sokei has long been concerned with the mechanical, technological, and artificial as reflected in his 2015 book The Sound of Culture: Diaspora and Black Technopoetics, as well as in his ongoing creative work in sound. He continues to explore the topic in his forthcoming book Machines of Flesh and Blood (Viking/Random House, 2026) from which this lecture draws. In the talk, Chude Sokei traces a genealogy of contemporary legal battles around AI to origins in the antebellum south, all around questions of personhood and invention.
Moving from antebellum ideas of the enslaved person as machine, like Joyce Heth’s billing in P.T. Barnum’s menagerie as an automaton and enslaved laborers used as agricultural tools, to the contemporary question of personhood of machines, like DABUS and BINA48, Chude Sokei charts the progression of the conversation. He locates fertile ground for this struggle in the antebellum and postbellum US Patent Office. The United States is a community of inventors, Chude Sokei contends. From the outset the Constitution encouraged development, and beginning with the 1790 Patent Act the US government opened a pathway for inventors to protect and profit from those innovations. However, as the lecture discusses, this clear-cut route which only required an oath and proof of citizenship grew murky in the face of the enslaved inventor. Chude Sokei remarked that enslaved people who already “vacillated between and among thing, human, animal, and machine”, were not considered legal persons nor citizens and thus, could not meet the legal requirements to hold a patent.
Many enslavers succeeded in claiming the inventions of their enslaved laborers as their own, and a few sought patents while acknowledging that an enslaved person produced the innovation. Two such were in the attempts by Jefferson Davis, Confederate President, to patent the inventions of Benjamin Thornton Montgomery who was enslaved by Davis’s brother, and in J.E. Stewart’s attempt to patent Ned’s double cotton scraper. These attempts were denied because the inventions were not the patent seekers’ creations and because the enslaved could not meet the requirements of the title “inventor.” The contentious decision of the patent office sparked the Confederacy during their brief secession to not only welcome slave’s inventions, but also to establish a Confederate patent office. Chude Sokei notes, “the debate was in fact about technology, about blacks and technology, and about blacks as technology.” This was somewhat remedied by the 13 th and 14 th amendments, the first abolishing slavery and the latter expanding juridical personhood and citizenship.
Transporting us to 1990, Chude Sokei then discussed a similar debate around an unfree inventor named DABUS, Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience. Again, in the U.S. Patent Office a debate rages on about the not human, not free. DABUS as the property and creation of Stephen L. Thaler, is at the center of a patent case which brings to the fore questions of the ownership of inventive AI’s designs and thus profits, as well as the rights of machines.
In the decades since the 14 th amendment new pathways for incorporating the nonhuman into the category of person have arisen. Corporations and partnerships were granted personhood along with accompanying rights and protections in 1886. Contemporary movements led by Indigenous peoples have fought for the personhood and thus protection of environments, from parts of the Ganges River to the Amazon rainforest, and in the US, for the rights of Manoomin, wild rice, and the personhood of the Klamath River. For Chude Sokei, cases from Davis and Stewart’s to the 14th Amendment and Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company, established a legal pathway for what we now see, the expansion of these legal categories. With South Africa’s patent office granting DABUS the right to its creation and European parliament ruling for electronic personhood, Chude Sokei concluded that the “new frontier of civil rights” is in the realm of technology, in relation to algorithms, electronic persons, AI, and autonomous robots.
The audience of around thirty people jumped into conversation on the contemporary questions of ethics, global understandings and relationships to technology, literature on the mechanized other, including Karel Čapek’s work, and the Saudi Arabian citizen robot Sophia. Folks ended the discussion returning to Chude Sokei’s trajectory from Joyce Heth to BINA48, imagining the potential near future his lecture offered a glimpse of, reminding us that science fiction does not stay fiction for long.
-Carolyn Parker-Fairbain, American & New England Studies Program, November 2024
