4 ms·

Yes, this paradigm makes a lot of sense in the present moment. In a hypothetical future where there is a long-lived AI agent, acting autonomously over multiple

by im3w1l 5y ago

Yes, this paradigm makes a lot of sense in the present moment. In a hypothetical future where there is a long-lived AI agent, acting autonomously over multiple years or even decades it will become less and less seen as a tool used by a human person. But, no need to update policies until then.

nextaccountic 5y ago
But we already have multi-generational non-person entities: companies. Copyright may be assigned to companies instead of persons. They are just registered under a bunch of people's names, which act as owners (shareholders), and can change over time. In the future, AI entities will probably be registered as companies themselves (or maybe they will be just company assets), and will be owned by people. Which doesn't bode well for strong AI, but I suspect that even after we reach strong AI people will still grasp at straws for many decades or centuries, denying them personhood because they are just software that run on computers.
dgreensp 5y ago
The amount of autonomy that makes something a “person” has only ever been drastically understated in these sorts of discussions, I find. Like saying a future self-driving taxi would own its own business and keep its profits. That’s like giving a self-driving tractor the deed to the farm. It’s easy to personify things that demonstrate some amount of “agency” (moving around on their own, making decisions), I guess, but lots of things do that and it doesn’t make them legal people who can own property and the like. Even if it made sense to give a deed to a tractor, no one would do it.
- ineedasername 5y ago
  You're making me regret my decision to setup my Roomba as the sole asset of a corporation owned by the Roomba itself. It seemed like the moral, ethical thing to do, but it doesn't even cash its paychecks.
- cupofpython 5y ago
  >Even if it made sense to give a deed to a tractor, no one would do it. I mean... we both know people would if they could, right? If a tractor approaches me with a QR code to a smart contract that will give me enormous money in exchange for my deed.. I'm going to do it
  - TillE 5y ago
    Where did the tractor get the money? I mean, people can probably give stuff to an "AI" the same way they leave stuff to their cats, but we are an absurdly long way off from developing an artificial intelligence with real agency. These are questions for science fiction authors, not actual legal scholars.
    - ineedasername 5y ago
      The legal and theoretical framework already exists somewhat for artificial entities in the form of corporate law and corporate personhood.
    - cupofpython 5y ago
      theoretically? it operates on smart contracts, so farmers pay it and it goes and does tractor things on their farm for them. It has no user access to its wallet, and the only way to regain human control of the tractor is with a factory reset which will lose all the wallet details. So the tractor is the only one with access to the money, and it accumulates enough to try to buy a deed for whatever algorithmic reasons
  - IncRnd 5y ago
    Yea, in this analogy you already own the tractor, so you already own the tractor's money. I don't think I'm going on a limb by saying that isn't slavery. You already own the tractor and the money. There is no emancipation needed. If somebody else's tractor approached you with a smart contract, the owner of that tractor would have a case that the smart contract was not entered into in good faith, since a tractor cannot enter a contract at all. Maybe you'd even get charged with theft.

by im3w1l 5y ago

nextaccountic 5y ago

But we already have multi-generational non-person entities: companies. Copyright may be assigned to companies instead of persons. They are just registered under a bunch of people's names, which act as owners (shareholders), and can change over time. In the future, AI entities will probably be registered as companies themselves (or maybe they will be just company assets), and will be owned by people. Which doesn't bode well for strong AI, but I suspect that even after we reach strong AI people will still grasp at straws for many decades or centuries, denying them personhood because they are just software that run on computers.

dgreensp 5y ago

The amount of autonomy that makes something a “person” has only ever been drastically understated in these sorts of discussions, I find. Like saying a future self-driving taxi would own its own business and keep its profits. That’s like giving a self-driving tractor the deed to the farm. It’s easy to personify things that demonstrate some amount of “agency” (moving around on their own, making decisions), I guess, but lots of things do that and it doesn’t make them legal people who can own property and the like. Even if it made sense to give a deed to a tractor, no one would do it.

ineedasername 5y ago
You're making me regret my decision to setup my Roomba as the sole asset of a corporation owned by the Roomba itself. It seemed like the moral, ethical thing to do, but it doesn't even cash its paychecks.
cupofpython 5y ago
>Even if it made sense to give a deed to a tractor, no one would do it. I mean... we both know people would if they could, right? If a tractor approaches me with a QR code to a smart contract that will give me enormous money in exchange for my deed.. I'm going to do it
- TillE 5y ago
  Where did the tractor get the money? I mean, people can probably give stuff to an "AI" the same way they leave stuff to their cats, but we are an absurdly long way off from developing an artificial intelligence with real agency. These are questions for science fiction authors, not actual legal scholars.
  - ineedasername 5y ago
    The legal and theoretical framework already exists somewhat for artificial entities in the form of corporate law and corporate personhood.
  - cupofpython 5y ago
    theoretically? it operates on smart contracts, so farmers pay it and it goes and does tractor things on their farm for them. It has no user access to its wallet, and the only way to regain human control of the tractor is with a factory reset which will lose all the wallet details. So the tractor is the only one with access to the money, and it accumulates enough to try to buy a deed for whatever algorithmic reasons
- IncRnd 5y ago
  Yea, in this analogy you already own the tractor, so you already own the tractor's money. I don't think I'm going on a limb by saying that isn't slavery. You already own the tractor and the money. There is no emancipation needed. If somebody else's tractor approached you with a smart contract, the owner of that tractor would have a case that the smart contract was not entered into in good faith, since a tractor cannot enter a contract at all. Maybe you'd even get charged with theft.