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The present article compares human and artificial intelligence (AI) intentionality and personhood. It focuses on the difference between “intrinsic” intentionality—the object directedness that derives from animate existence and its drive for survival, and appears most especially in human conscious activity—and a more functional notion of “intentional relation” that does not require consciousness. The present article looks at intentional relations as objective concepts that can apply equally to animate beings, robots, and AI systems. As such, large language models are best described as disembodied Cartesian egos, while humanoid robots, even with large language model brains, are still far from satisfying benchmarks of embodied personhood. While robots constructed by humans have borrowed intentionality and limited forms of objective intentional relations, in the future, robots may construct themselves. If these self-constructed robots are adaptive and can persist for multiple generations as a new kind of species, then it is reasonable to suppose that they have their own form of intrinsic intentionality, different from that of animate beings currently existing on Earth.

DOI: 10.1093/9780198945215.003.0006