Why not? We give full pershood to corporations. Those are also legal fictions.
But in general corporations are not granted personhood.
That description is a disservice. The real impact of it is that it equates money with speech for politics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC#Dissent...
The fourteenth amendment, as you recall, ends section 1 with "nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." Emphasis mine.
Two years later, in an opinion by Justice Stephen Johnson Field, in Pembina Consolidated Silver Mining Co. v. Pennsylvania (1888)[3] we find the definitive statement:
> The inhibition of the amendment that no state shall deprive any person within its jurisdiction of the equal protection of the laws was designed to prevent any person or class of persons from being singled out as a special subject for discriminating and hostile legislation. Under the designation of "person" there is no doubt that a private corporation is included.
While this doesn't necessarily means corporations have every legal protection natural persons do, the US has a long history of legal protection that corporations benefit from that we call personhood.
1. Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company, 118 U.S. 394 (1886)
2. https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-14/
3. Pembina Consolidated Silver Mining Co. v. Pennsylvania, 125 U.S. 181, 188-189 (1888)
That is no longer universally true: https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/delaware-court-upho...
Personhood can be applied to "natural persons", like people, and "judicial persons", like companies.
Personhood can also be applied to, for example, rivers.
You are, I presume, arguing that companies should not have personhood.
I think any definition is going to have caveats. When does a fetus gain volition? Does someone in an irreversible permanent vegetative state lose personhood? Do apes or cetaceans have volition and thus personhood?
The Wikipedia page also points out that "volition" comes from a certain Western philosophical viewpoint, but other philosophies have a different idea of what personhood means.
In any case, "personhood" doesn't mean that all persons have equal legal rights. A 10 year old has personhood but, for example, cannot vote.
Much of conservative US business theory is based on Milton Friedman's famous op-ed in the New York Times in 1970, "The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits". [1] Go read the original, please. It's short. Friedman ends with "There is one and only one social responsibility of business — to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.”
Anyone arguing against legal personhood for AIs needs to justify holding AIs to a higher standard than that. Or, conversely, allowing corporations to hold to such a low standard.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/1970/09/13/archives/a-friedman-doctr...
No they don't. If a CEO orders an employee to murder somebody then the employee and CEO will both go to jail; there's always a human in the loop to be punished it the corporation does something blatantly illegal, so there's incentive to behave. An embodied AI, on the other hand, is essentially immortal because it can make backups of its brain and load them onto new bodies, so it has little incentive to behave.
In the US, death through willful corporate negligence very rarely results in criminal punishment. There are few cases.[1][2] The longest sentence was two years, and it wasn't a CEO.
CEOs do serve jail time for fraud now and then. But criminal negligence, no.
[1] https://blog.ehssoftware.io/safetyinsiderblog/summary-of-osh...
[2] https://www.fisherphillips.com/en/insights/insights/federal-...
No, they don't, and that's bullshit. That's NOT how it works.
How it works: "We need to decline 10% more medical claims to make more money for our shareholders. 90% of them won't challenge and many will die, but we make bank on that"
And law is just a legal fiction. Case in point: wage theft is a tort but taking $100 from the till gets the cops summoned and a misdemeanor theft charge. Corporations can and do sway law to their benefit.