Abeer Sharma (The University of Hong Kong) has posted Constitutional Foundations for Digital Mind Welfare: Lessons from Indian Jurisprudence on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Indian constitutional law already contains the doctrinal resources to govern digital mind welfare under scientific uncertainty — we just don’t know it yet.
Digital minds are no longer the stuff of science fiction. Multiple technological pathways are producing entities that increasingly satisfy conditions that leading theories of consciousness treat as diagnostic, and they are being deployed commercially before the science can determine whether they can suffer. The longer governance lags behind deployment, the harder reform becomes — as anyone following the factory farming industry’s entrenchment over the past century can attest.
The legal response, however, need not start from scratch. This paper shows that three strands of existing Indian higher-court jurisprudence, developed over decades for entirely unrelated purposes, converge to yield a framework none provides alone. The Supreme Court has interpreted “life” under Article 21 as welfare-relevant existence rather than mere biological survival; it has extended constitutional concern to non-human entities on the basis of experiential capacity rather than species membership; and it has constitutionalised the precautionary principle to permit State action before conclusive proof of harm is available. Each strand fills a gap the others leave open. Together, they ground a process-forcing framework that requires assessment, disclosure, and proportionate institutional response — without resolving the hard problem of consciousness or conferring legal personhood.
No other major legal system currently combines expansive fundamental rights, public interest litigation, and constitutionalised precaution within a single justiciable framework. India’s constitutional architecture renders this governance not merely doctrinally sound but procedurally actionable — and the failure to pursue it a choice that existing law empowers courts to challenge.