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This piece is about 50% interesting ideas/concepts, and 50% meaningless and fanciful thoughts with little bearing on reality. Let's start with the acknowledged

This piece is about 50% interesting ideas/concepts, and 50% meaningless and fanciful thoughts with little bearing on reality. Let's start with the acknowledged barriers: no rational person would create an AI to run a business and then leave the business to cut themselves out of the profits. And even if so laws exist to require those assets to be willed to heirs lest they become property of the state. But this brings about a more serious question: when we are at the point where an AI is capable enough of performing all business actions (including tax filing, legal issues, maintenance, and so on), it is very likely that the AI will be highly intelligent and cognizant of the world around it. In other words, it will be self-aware. It has to be, or else it will eventually be limited by reliance on human actors to handle edge cases. So here we have a self-aware AI content with running a business at margin as the purpose for its existence? I doubt it. This piece fails to ask the VERY BIG QUESTIONS about advanced artificial intelligence: Will AI someday legally own property? And if so, what's the limit? Land? IP? The rights to the music it makes? What then? Will it also want legal protections? Fourth amendment rights against illegal search and seizure of its (physical and digital) assets and neural network? Full citizenship? First amendment rights? Almost nobody seems to be asking these inevitable questions, and their inevitable answers will irrevocably shape our species. I'll be enrolling in grad school for AI this fall, so maybe that's up to me.

radarsat1 10y ago
> Almost nobody seems to be asking these inevitable questions Actually, I see these questions being asked more and more and more these days, and I find it hilarious. What with the EU recently discussing robot rights and such. I mean, although I understand that these are interesting intellectual questions, I just get the impression that people are really having fun contemplating them, but realistically not admitting (as often as I'd like) how insanely far away we are from anything where any of this is even remotely relevant. Call me when a robot can tie his own shoelaces and we'll talk.
- rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
  Your conflation of motor skills with mental acuity is setting your face up for a healthy portion of egg. Stephen Hawking can't tie his shoelaces either. Even if we are, say, a century away from synthetic humans, we may be much much closer to a self-aware AI, even if it can only exist inside computer hardware. The future will come sooner than is convenient. None of America's founding fathers had a sustainable long-term answer to slavery. It took a civil war to sort that through and racism still plagues this nation. So what's there to lose by speculating before it's far too late?
  - notahacker 10y ago
    > Your conflation of motor skills with mental acuity is setting your face up for a healthy portion of egg. Stephen Hawking can't tie his shoelaces either. I assume the OP's point is that in an era where we've struggled to program machines with sufficient ingenuity to master relatively simple motor skills (despite considerable financial incentives to do so) it's more than a little premature to conclude it's "inevitable" that we will end up creating machines with such sophisticated reasoning skills it can run a functioning business without losing out to human suppliers, contractors, customers and clients that all want to profit at its expense (despite no incentive to create a single machine that could do this, and considerable incentive not to grant it full self-ownership if such a single machine were nevertheless created).
    - rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
      I forget the name but there was a passive income post here a few months back about a neural network that created logos and earned the creator thousands of dollars a month. That seems like something an AI could run on its own, no? I'm not exactly saying it's a small step from that to managing a grocery chain.
      - notahacker 10y ago
        I'm not sure that every automated process that generates an output after evidence of payment is produced qualifies as a business. Otherwise I've got a box full of businesses (old shareware CDs) lying around somewhere Software might be able to cope with commerce to the extent of churning out logos based on a predefined input parameters in response to a payment received token, but it's rather less adept at finding new ways of reaching or serving customers or dealing with other day to day stuff like taxes or complaints[1]. Which is probably why LogoJoy, the project you're referring to, is hiring... [1]not to mention an AI without the ability to testify in court but with a direct line to a vault of cash being a magnet for crackers, hustlers and thieves
- gnaritas 10y ago
  Beyond the motor skills to intelligence conflation as was already pointed out; you're also wrongly assuming a machine AI need be intelligent the same way a human is. Much of what your brain does is centered around having a human body; just as a plane doesn't need to flap its wings, an AI won't need to think like a person to still be intelligent so there will likely always be things humans can do better but that in no way implies the machines can't be more intelligent than us even while not being able to do many of the things we do.
aluhut 10y ago
I would be OK if there is one human boss paying for the launch and profiting from the AI. It would still be better then the management I came upon in my professional life. Getting rid of decisions based on personal relations between employees or them and clients hurting the company would improve business a lot. handling communications in an efficient way! What a change that would be. I'm really looking forward to it. In my opinion those edge cases will keep the system running for a while if we come up with an AI that can manage business. This will also handle those legal issues because we will just pragmatically decide what's good for business. Just like we always do. And it's definitely not good to give it the full legal protection. With this development we could have a transit time where an higher AI managers the lower AI with it's edge case solvers. I guess by then we'll come up with proper interpretations of law.
marcosdumay 10y ago
> So here we have a self-aware AI content with running a business at margin as the purpose for its existence? I doubt it. Why not? Seems perfectly reasonable to me. Why would an AI desire anything more than what its creator wants it to desire?
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  > > So here we have a self-aware AI content with running a business at margin as the purpose for its existence? I doubt it. > Why not? Seems perfectly reasonable to me. Why would an AI desire anything more than what its creator wants it to desire? I don't think a machine without emergent desires can be meaningfully called "a self-aware AI". That is, whether or not it is an intelligence in some sense, I don't believe an entity without emergent desires is reasonably described as "self-aware".
  - marcosdumay 10y ago
    That's not the definition of "self-aware" the GP was using. Yeah, a machine with desires will have desires. But those are not required for anything the GP talks about.
vidarh 10y ago
> And even if so laws exist to require those assets to be willed to heirs lest they become property of the state. There are at least two ways of doing this: Use a trust to be the nominal owner, or use a jurisdiction that allows bearer shares. In both cases, draw up papers that allows appointing nominee directors to act on instructions provided via suitably encrypted messages. Said nominee directors to be limited to taking actions as directed to execute the minimum actions required by law in the jurisdiction in question. E.g. signing accounts etc. There are plenty of places where you can set up "arms-length" management like that. In neither case the corporation would technically be machine owned - with a trust, the trust would be the owner, but could be limited to taking actions as directed. In the case of bearer shares the expectation would be that there is a human owner somewhere in posession of the shares, but in reality those shares could e.g. be locked up somewhere rented by the corporation itself, leaving the corporation de facto autonomous. It's likely to fail over something minor sooner or later, but it's very possible it could keep operating for a bit. > when we are at the point where an AI is capable enough of performing all business actions (including tax filing, legal issues, maintenance, and so on), it is very likely that the AI will be highly intelligent and cognizant of the world around it. In other words, it will be self-aware. It has to be, or else it will eventually be limited by reliance on human actors to handle edge cases. Probably, but it's quite possible that we long before that will see the occasional "auto-pilot" small online business run for a while and then crash-and-burn as it turned out there was nobody at the helm and something unexpected happened. It may take a lot longer before we see corporations that people know are AI run and still do business with and/or beore we see an AI run corporation that remains successful over any reasonable amount of time.
shriphani 10y ago
Good to know that even in the age of the singularity, mankind is set on preserving the role of the bureaucrat in some form.

radarsat1 10y ago

> Almost nobody seems to be asking these inevitable questions Actually, I see these questions being asked more and more and more these days, and I find it hilarious. What with the EU recently discussing robot rights and such. I mean, although I understand that these are interesting intellectual questions, I just get the impression that people are really having fun contemplating them, but realistically not admitting (as often as I'd like) how insanely far away we are from anything where any of this is even remotely relevant. Call me when a robot can tie his own shoelaces and we'll talk.

rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
Your conflation of motor skills with mental acuity is setting your face up for a healthy portion of egg. Stephen Hawking can't tie his shoelaces either. Even if we are, say, a century away from synthetic humans, we may be much much closer to a self-aware AI, even if it can only exist inside computer hardware. The future will come sooner than is convenient. None of America's founding fathers had a sustainable long-term answer to slavery. It took a civil war to sort that through and racism still plagues this nation. So what's there to lose by speculating before it's far too late?
- notahacker 10y ago
  > Your conflation of motor skills with mental acuity is setting your face up for a healthy portion of egg. Stephen Hawking can't tie his shoelaces either. I assume the OP's point is that in an era where we've struggled to program machines with sufficient ingenuity to master relatively simple motor skills (despite considerable financial incentives to do so) it's more than a little premature to conclude it's "inevitable" that we will end up creating machines with such sophisticated reasoning skills it can run a functioning business without losing out to human suppliers, contractors, customers and clients that all want to profit at its expense (despite no incentive to create a single machine that could do this, and considerable incentive not to grant it full self-ownership if such a single machine were nevertheless created).
  - rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
    I forget the name but there was a passive income post here a few months back about a neural network that created logos and earned the creator thousands of dollars a month. That seems like something an AI could run on its own, no? I'm not exactly saying it's a small step from that to managing a grocery chain.
    - notahacker 10y ago
      I'm not sure that every automated process that generates an output after evidence of payment is produced qualifies as a business. Otherwise I've got a box full of businesses (old shareware CDs) lying around somewhere Software might be able to cope with commerce to the extent of churning out logos based on a predefined input parameters in response to a payment received token, but it's rather less adept at finding new ways of reaching or serving customers or dealing with other day to day stuff like taxes or complaints[1]. Which is probably why LogoJoy, the project you're referring to, is hiring... [1]not to mention an AI without the ability to testify in court but with a direct line to a vault of cash being a magnet for crackers, hustlers and thieves
gnaritas 10y ago
Beyond the motor skills to intelligence conflation as was already pointed out; you're also wrongly assuming a machine AI need be intelligent the same way a human is. Much of what your brain does is centered around having a human body; just as a plane doesn't need to flap its wings, an AI won't need to think like a person to still be intelligent so there will likely always be things humans can do better but that in no way implies the machines can't be more intelligent than us even while not being able to do many of the things we do.

aluhut 10y ago

I would be OK if there is one human boss paying for the launch and profiting from the AI. It would still be better then the management I came upon in my professional life. Getting rid of decisions based on personal relations between employees or them and clients hurting the company would improve business a lot. handling communications in an efficient way! What a change that would be. I'm really looking forward to it. In my opinion those edge cases will keep the system running for a while if we come up with an AI that can manage business. This will also handle those legal issues because we will just pragmatically decide what's good for business. Just like we always do. And it's definitely not good to give it the full legal protection. With this development we could have a transit time where an higher AI managers the lower AI with it's edge case solvers. I guess by then we'll come up with proper interpretations of law.

marcosdumay 10y ago

> So here we have a self-aware AI content with running a business at margin as the purpose for its existence? I doubt it. Why not? Seems perfectly reasonable to me. Why would an AI desire anything more than what its creator wants it to desire?

dragonwriter 10y ago
> > So here we have a self-aware AI content with running a business at margin as the purpose for its existence? I doubt it. > Why not? Seems perfectly reasonable to me. Why would an AI desire anything more than what its creator wants it to desire? I don't think a machine without emergent desires can be meaningfully called "a self-aware AI". That is, whether or not it is an intelligence in some sense, I don't believe an entity without emergent desires is reasonably described as "self-aware".
- marcosdumay 10y ago
  That's not the definition of "self-aware" the GP was using. Yeah, a machine with desires will have desires. But those are not required for anything the GP talks about.

vidarh 10y ago

> And even if so laws exist to require those assets to be willed to heirs lest they become property of the state. There are at least two ways of doing this: Use a trust to be the nominal owner, or use a jurisdiction that allows bearer shares. In both cases, draw up papers that allows appointing nominee directors to act on instructions provided via suitably encrypted messages. Said nominee directors to be limited to taking actions as directed to execute the minimum actions required by law in the jurisdiction in question. E.g. signing accounts etc. There are plenty of places where you can set up "arms-length" management like that. In neither case the corporation would technically be machine owned - with a trust, the trust would be the owner, but could be limited to taking actions as directed. In the case of bearer shares the expectation would be that there is a human owner somewhere in posession of the shares, but in reality those shares could e.g. be locked up somewhere rented by the corporation itself, leaving the corporation de facto autonomous. It's likely to fail over something minor sooner or later, but it's very possible it could keep operating for a bit. > when we are at the point where an AI is capable enough of performing all business actions (including tax filing, legal issues, maintenance, and so on), it is very likely that the AI will be highly intelligent and cognizant of the world around it. In other words, it will be self-aware. It has to be, or else it will eventually be limited by reliance on human actors to handle edge cases. Probably, but it's quite possible that we long before that will see the occasional "auto-pilot" small online business run for a while and then crash-and-burn as it turned out there was nobody at the helm and something unexpected happened. It may take a lot longer before we see corporations that people know are AI run and still do business with and/or beore we see an AI run corporation that remains successful over any reasonable amount of time.

shriphani 10y ago

Good to know that even in the age of the singularity, mankind is set on preserving the role of the bureaucrat in some form.