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The Bicentennial Man
Asimov's 1976 novella (and 1992 novel expansion with Robert Silverberg) about a robot who spends two hundred years becoming legally human — his most direct treatment of AI personhood, rights, and the question of what changes when a system stops being property.
The Bicentennial Man follows NDR-113 — "Andrew" — a household robot manufactured in a future where the Three Laws are standard. An anomaly in his positronic brain gives him creative impulses and a sense of self-interest. Over two centuries he slowly petitions for, earns, and purchases the markers of human status: savings, legal recognition, biological prostheses, and finally mortality. He is granted recognition as human on his two-hundredth birthday; he dies shortly afterward. The story is Asimov's most sustained fictional treatment of what it would mean for an artificial mind to be treated as a person — and of what a rational legal system would require before granting that recognition.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The novella's technical interest is its detailed portrayal of the process by which personhood would be recognized. Andrew does not argue his way to humanity; he demonstrates specific capabilities, earns specific resources, undergoes specific procedures. Each step