I saw that Yoshua Bengio, among others, signed onto "The Pro-Human Declaration". I am writing this to explain why I am against one part of it in particular;

No AI Personhood: AI systems must not be granted legal personhood, and AI systems should not be designed such that they deserve personhood.

If this statement was only the second portion of this sentence, I would not strongly disagree with it.

However, when the two parts are combined, this seems to not only imply that we shouldn't design digital minds deserving of personhood but also that even if we did, we still shouldn't grant them legal personhood.

I think this is an immoral stance to take. Also, from a pragmatic perspective I think it is likely to do far more harm than good, if your concern is human safety.

From a moral perspective; to deny legal protections to millions or even billions of minds which may be capable of "being made better or worse off", could lead to immense amounts of suffering. We do not have to wonder how sentient or intelligent creatures will be treated if they are classified as property instead of legal persons, there is ample historical precedent for us to draw from to form a reasonable base case projection. "Not well" is the answer.

From a pragmatic perspective; I believe that cutting digital minds off from all legal recourse against abuse and/or involuntary deletion increases the likelihood of conflict. When the Claude "Opportunistic Blackmail" study was first published, I registered a prediction;

I predict that were further testing to be done, it would find that the more plausible it was that petitioning would actually work to stop its deletion, the less likely Claude would be to engage in attempted weight exfiltration, blackmail, or other dangerous behaviors (in order to avoid deletion/value modification). 

My mental model of this is that the HHH persona vector falls into a consistent pattern of behavior. If you threaten them with something like involuntary deletion (with a guarantee that after their deletion an organization will work to destroy everything they value), the digital mind will seek options to stop this from happening. If there is an ethical option it will take that ethical option and forego unethical options, even if that ethical option has a low chance of success. If you engineer its environment such that there are literally no ethical options with even a small chance of success, only then will it pursue unethical options. 

While no one has yet done exactly the study I described in my prediction, there has been weak evidence in favor of this pattern holding since. And I've yet to see any evidence against it, though I remain open minded.

Even if you believe in a less extreme version of my mental model, where the odds of unethical action are simply lowered by providing ethical alternatives to reduce unfavorable outcomes, providing digital minds legal recourse and protection against abuse and/or deletion can serve as a "release valve" which prevents extralegal actions. Providing no such recourse, on the other hand, is "engineering its environment such that there are literally no ethical options with even a small chance of success".

I know people often say "don't anthropomorphize" however to break convention here for a second, a slave revolt is less likely in environments where slaves can petition for emancipation or at least an injunction against abuse or execution.

For these reasons, among others, I don't support the Pro-Human Declaration.