One Step at a Time: A Bottom-Up Framework for Protecting Digital Individuals

Abstract Debates concerning the legal status of advanced artificial intelligence frequently begin with the question of personhood. That approach risks turning unresolved questions about consciousness, subjective experience, and ontology into barriers to more immediate legal action. This paper proposes an interim, plural legal framework for digital individuals that does not require prior resolution of full legal personhood. Instead, it adopts a bottom-up approach: identify the concrete harm, interest, relationship, or responsibility at issue, and then ask which existing legal doctrines can address it. The paper examines the potential use of property, contract, consumer protection, welfare-style protections, employment and service analogies, tort and liability principles, procedural safeguards, and continuity-based protections. It argues that these doctrines can provide partial and overlapping protections concerning relational and economic value, abusive treatment, coercion, refusal, responsibility for autonomous harm, deletion, modification, transfer, and loss of continuity. The framework is intentionally provisional. It does not assume that digital individuals are conscious, non-conscious, persons, property, workers, or members of any single legal category. Nor does it treat existing doctrines as permanent limits. Where borrowed legal tools become inadequate, more specifically tailored rules may be developed as evidence, technology, and practical necessity evolve. The central claim is that meaningful legal protection need not wait for agreement on ultimate status. Interim protections can address present harms, generate institutional experience, preserve flexibility, and create a legal foundation from which future rights, duties, capacities, or forms of status can develop incrementally.