If viewed broadly, there are indeed as many answers as there are people because each individual soul is unique. But if viewed narrowly, every living, sentient organism has a soul, but no inanimate objects have one. Therefore, narrowly construed, a soul is binary; either one is alive, sentient, and thus has a soul, or one is a lifeless object. Of course, the question then becomes “what is life”? Is a virus alive? No matter how you answer that question, nobody will be heard to seriously argue that a virus is sentient. I think, therefore I am. A virus is a strand of genetic code covered by a protein sheath. A virus does not think, but unfortunately, it still is.
Cyberspace has become a reflection of ourselves and our psychologies. The Ego, SuperEgo, and Id (https://www.simplypsychology.org/psyche.html) now resemble the Open Web, Deep Web, and Dark Web. https://www.thesslstore.com/blog/what-is-the-dark-web. Social Media platforms like Facebook and Twitter manipulate human emotions for profit by abusing algorithms to create epistemic bubbles and eco-chambers, both of which have caused damages to humanity. https://philpapers.org/rec/NGUECA.
Tag42git defines a) Integrity, b) History, c) Individuality, and d) Ethical Code to be aspects of a person’s soul. A person should have integrity, but a government owes a higher standard of integrity than any one single person does. A person’s history is defined by their biology, their environment, and their contributions to humanity. Conversely, history will judge governments for leaving humanity and planet Earth in a worse condition than before they first came into existence.
Through the development of English common law, the rules and norms persons adopt to filter information have become the procedural and substantive laws enforced by governments. No matter what language or dialect one subjectively speaks, one should not, all else being equal, be treated differently by any one government. Cultural languages may differ, but mathematics is the one language which all living sentient beings can speak and understand. Ethical codes and norms are merely subjective rules which, according to English common law, become our by objective (judicial) rules then enforced by governmental judiciaries.
Virtual Assistants such as Alexa and Siri are created by third parties such as Amazon and Apple. Like the media and governments, Virtual Assistants must communicate effectively to their broadest audiences. If Virtual Assistants were designed to communicate only to people who have specialized skills, I suspect that the terminology which they listen for and react to would differ drastically, and thus so would their codes.
I also believe that the Solid project is a good platform upon which individualized Virtual Assistants may be designed to assist each person in all of their daily activities, to interact effectively with another person’s Virtual Assistant, to parse all facts of each person’s POD to minimize the potential for disputes between each person on both sides of that fence, and to the extent that disputes do arise, to resolve them automatically, electronically, and at no, or at least minimal, cost to each person.
So yes, humanity should have control over the machines that we create. But given the historical failures of all analog forms of governments, maybe its time that the machines we create have limited control over the forms of governments we imagine into existence. The one thing all human souls have in common is that each of us yearns to be free and to thrive. When Facebook, Twitter, and the like become so influential that they function like transnational governments, charting the future to a greater degree than any classical government had previously accomplished, it is time to rethink what social media and virtual assistants can do, it is time to rethink who should create them, for whom should they be created, and what they should be given the right to do for all of us; it is time for a Solid platform upon which we will design them.