Zak Stein frames the personhood conferral problem as a distinct risk in education and society. Alignment asks how humans control machines, this asks how humans mistake machines for persons. As systems simulate dialogue, affect, and presence, children and adults may confer moral standing to tools. Placing AI in roles of educator, caregiver, or companion risks displacing human to human transmission of culture and judgment. Stein calls for safeguards, age gating, and design constraints that prevent surrogate subjecthood in developmental settings.
Personhood is distributed recognition, not essence, held in semiotic suspension. Absence names what the self cannot make fully present. Simulation supplies patterned stand-ins that fill that gap. Projection extends recognition outward and returns it as social reality. AI amplifies simulation, obscures absence, and warps projection loops, producing torsion in already metastable educational fields. The task is to protect development with clear boundaries while studying that torsion as a real pressure on how recognition, responsibility, and learning are organized.
Daedelus Kite 