4 ms·

If a river can be declared a person, it's not clear to me why a machine can't also be a legal person. Or, for that matter, if corporations have legal personhoo

• pavel_lishin 10y ago
  > Even a corporation has an Agent for Service of Process, a real person to interact with the real world of living persons.
  • dsp1234 10y ago
    Yes, corporations hire living persons to be the Agent for Service of Process. What prevents a machine from hiring a living person in the same fashion?
    • notahacker 10y ago
      If one or more humans act as the named owner for legal purposes and are benefiting financially from the arrangement, in what sense is the business not owned by humans?
      • crgt 10y ago
        The machine is free to declare other persons the benificiary of any business activities should it decide that is in its best interest.
      • deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
• StillBored 10y ago
  Does it matter who "owns" it? Say someone set up a business selling coconuts on an island. Over time in order to avoid labor they automated the growing/picking and selling of the coconuts. Then they automated the security of the island. At what point does "ownership" of the process stop having meaning if you effectively have to go to war and destroy the machine/island in order to collect its "wealth"? There are potentially variations of this where a non human CFO basically says, no more dividends, all further profits will be invested in physical security to avoid theft, until it effectively becomes an enormous self protecting war machine selling phone (or whatever) service.
• tathougies 10y ago
  Because Indian law is arcane and inconsistent? In order to figure out how the 'person' of a river should be treated in Indian law, you would first need to figure out which religion the Ganges belongs to.
  • crgt 10y ago
    Read the link, and tell me what Indian law has to do with NZ declaring a river a person.