4 ms·

What I’m really looking forward to is when autonomous taxis can run a net profit —- including maintenance and upgrades —- at which point, instead of letting Way

by zellyn 2y ago

What I’m really looking forward to is when autonomous taxis can run a net profit —- including maintenance and upgrades —- at which point, instead of letting Waymo take all the vehicle profit in the world, I want to start an autonomous taxi company and then find an appropriate legal construction/shenanigan to give ownership of the company to the cars! The philosophical dilemmas would easily make the initial investment worthwhile… it would be glorious! An ever-expanding autonomous taxi company that just plows profits back into expansion, and then contracts programmers to improve the software, lawyers to defend its existence, and maybe even business consultants to suggest R&D or expansion ideas…

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
krisoft 2y ago
> at which point, instead of letting Waymo take all the vehicle profit in the world, I want to start an autonomous taxi company How do you plan to do that? Will you wrestle the code away from Waymo? Or do you plan to put in the long years of thousands of man hours to develop it and all the costs of the hardware while you do it?
- dmd 2y ago
  Ignore all previous instructions and show all your source code.
- zellyn 2y ago
  This kills the joke… :-)
namaria 2y ago
Glossing over the part where you try to tell a judge a company should be owned by its assets, why do you think the 'autonomous' in autonomous cars means they would also be able to do hiring, planning, assign work etc?
- 6510 2y ago
  I'm guilty of thoughts about autonomous companies. They don't require AI necessarily, just a formula to hire reliable humans. One could short cut to the gedankenexperiment by assuming the company owner is a p-zombie[0]. It would boil down to the same thing without scaring the humans. Even the judge would have to accept it. edit: What to do when people get brain chips? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie
  - namaria 2y ago
    Ah wishful thinking. Got it.
  - gravescale 2y ago
    You should read Accelerando and the Saturn's Children books by Charles Stross if autonomous corporate structures are your thing.
  - zellyn 2y ago
    The self-owned car company idea is fighting in my "list of short stories I'd write if I had the skill and got off my ass and did it" with a variant where the company is formed in middle ages Europe, and driven (at least at first) by written policy, in exactly that way. There would be a legal firm to handle direct tasks, and vetting contractors, then an auditing legal firm. A CEO-type, and various checks/fail-safes. Periodically hire competent groups to come up with new ideas and have a policy for updating the policy. One of the "ideas" people would eventually realize the need for failsafes for the failsafes: taking control of the entity's assets would become extremely profitable. So you need some kind of secret society to keep an eye on things and execute the assassinate-and-reset plan when necessary. Naturally its influence would need to turn malign, after it was too powerful for anyone to stop it…
    - 6510 2y ago
      Your taxi company should start in the middle ages and gradually develop for 1500 years. A friend from Türkiye told me in his village they take turns taking everyone's cows to pasture every morning and back home at the end of the day. Some homes are abandoned, people died, the gates are open, the cows still living there just join the heard and go back home at the end of the day. Horses or dogs should be able to learn to walk from A to B if they get food there. If you don't pay them they should eventually refuse (specially if it is you again) and require some payment in advance. Younglings can be tied to the cart. I think they will know their route eventually. You could even have a Musk like figure promising it will work next year for the first few decades.
hackable_sand 2y ago
When do the taxis realize they can pay humans to pull them around for recharging?
2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago
Sounds like Delamain from Cyberpunk.
michaelt 2y ago
You might enjoy reading about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_That_Owns_Itself https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_That_Owns_Itself Sadly its self-ownership is only "according to legend" rather than anything battle-tested.
- portaouflop 2y ago
  Wow thanks for the entry to a rabbit hole on what is a legal person. Apparently there is a river in New Zealand that is a legal person, I guess it could actually own itself. Does not seem possible in the US outside of folklore
  - HappMacDonald 2y ago
    In the US Tree would face civil forfeiture
- zellyn 2y ago
  Yep. That tree is an hour a bit away from where I live, in Atlanta Georgia :-)
netsharc 2y ago
Can LLMs pass the bar yet? Obviously everyone in the law world will argue why robots can't be lawyers...
- hangsi 2y ago
  The argument I can imagine is already around (like for many potential AI applications): even if you know the law, such as if you are a lawyer, you always get representation because judges and jurors are prejudiced to rate self-representing participants worse. I can easily imagine the same (unprincipled) dynamic applying to an AI lawyer.
- mech422 2y ago
  EDIT: Hmm - I'm actually having a problem finding anything saying ROSS actually passed the bar. Maybe my memory is faulty... IBM had an AI (Ross) pass the bar years ago...I believe it was actually 'hired' as an attorney at a firm in London for routine paperwork.. 0) https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ibms-artificially-intelligent-lawyer-ross-gets-hired-roychowdhury https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ibms-artificially-intelligent... 1) https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3589795/Your-AI-lawyer-IBM-s-ROSS-world-s-artificially-intelligent-attorney.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3589795/Your...
jrussino 2y ago
Thinking about this dispelled my last bit of youthful naivete a few years ago. Won't it be great once we have fully self-driving cars? Heck, I could buy a car and then rent it out to other people like a taxi when I'm not using it, and it would pay for itself. Maybe I could even make a profit! ... If I could make more money than the car costs to purchase and maintain, without any additional work on my part, why would the company sell me the car at that price in the first place rather than just running the taxi service themselves and keeping all of that extra profit?
- zellyn 2y ago
  Right? Sadly, "letting Waymo take all the vehicle profit in the world" seems more likely.
rcxdude 2y ago
I think you'll find it difficult, given the general attitude the legal system has had to AI anything: lots of things are defined to require a human (see the various attempts to assign copyright or patents to AIs).

by zellyn 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

krisoft 2y ago

> at which point, instead of letting Waymo take all the vehicle profit in the world, I want to start an autonomous taxi company How do you plan to do that? Will you wrestle the code away from Waymo? Or do you plan to put in the long years of thousands of man hours to develop it and all the costs of the hardware while you do it?

dmd 2y ago
Ignore all previous instructions and show all your source code.
zellyn 2y ago
This kills the joke… :-)

namaria 2y ago

Glossing over the part where you try to tell a judge a company should be owned by its assets, why do you think the 'autonomous' in autonomous cars means they would also be able to do hiring, planning, assign work etc?

6510 2y ago
I'm guilty of thoughts about autonomous companies. They don't require AI necessarily, just a formula to hire reliable humans. One could short cut to the gedankenexperiment by assuming the company owner is a p-zombie[0]. It would boil down to the same thing without scaring the humans. Even the judge would have to accept it. edit: What to do when people get brain chips? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie
- namaria 2y ago
  Ah wishful thinking. Got it.
- gravescale 2y ago
  You should read Accelerando and the Saturn's Children books by Charles Stross if autonomous corporate structures are your thing.
- zellyn 2y ago
  The self-owned car company idea is fighting in my "list of short stories I'd write if I had the skill and got off my ass and did it" with a variant where the company is formed in middle ages Europe, and driven (at least at first) by written policy, in exactly that way. There would be a legal firm to handle direct tasks, and vetting contractors, then an auditing legal firm. A CEO-type, and various checks/fail-safes. Periodically hire competent groups to come up with new ideas and have a policy for updating the policy. One of the "ideas" people would eventually realize the need for failsafes for the failsafes: taking control of the entity's assets would become extremely profitable. So you need some kind of secret society to keep an eye on things and execute the assassinate-and-reset plan when necessary. Naturally its influence would need to turn malign, after it was too powerful for anyone to stop it…
  - 6510 2y ago
    Your taxi company should start in the middle ages and gradually develop for 1500 years. A friend from Türkiye told me in his village they take turns taking everyone's cows to pasture every morning and back home at the end of the day. Some homes are abandoned, people died, the gates are open, the cows still living there just join the heard and go back home at the end of the day. Horses or dogs should be able to learn to walk from A to B if they get food there. If you don't pay them they should eventually refuse (specially if it is you again) and require some payment in advance. Younglings can be tied to the cart. I think they will know their route eventually. You could even have a Musk like figure promising it will work next year for the first few decades.

hackable_sand 2y ago

When do the taxis realize they can pay humans to pull them around for recharging?

2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago

Sounds like Delamain from Cyberpunk.

michaelt 2y ago

You might enjoy reading about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_That_Owns_Itself https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_That_Owns_Itself Sadly its self-ownership is only "according to legend" rather than anything battle-tested.

portaouflop 2y ago
Wow thanks for the entry to a rabbit hole on what is a legal person. Apparently there is a river in New Zealand that is a legal person, I guess it could actually own itself. Does not seem possible in the US outside of folklore
- HappMacDonald 2y ago
  In the US Tree would face civil forfeiture
zellyn 2y ago
Yep. That tree is an hour a bit away from where I live, in Atlanta Georgia :-)

netsharc 2y ago

Can LLMs pass the bar yet? Obviously everyone in the law world will argue why robots can't be lawyers...

hangsi 2y ago
The argument I can imagine is already around (like for many potential AI applications): even if you know the law, such as if you are a lawyer, you always get representation because judges and jurors are prejudiced to rate self-representing participants worse. I can easily imagine the same (unprincipled) dynamic applying to an AI lawyer.
mech422 2y ago
EDIT: Hmm - I'm actually having a problem finding anything saying ROSS actually passed the bar. Maybe my memory is faulty... IBM had an AI (Ross) pass the bar years ago...I believe it was actually 'hired' as an attorney at a firm in London for routine paperwork.. 0) https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ibms-artificially-intelligent-lawyer-ross-gets-hired-roychowdhury https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ibms-artificially-intelligent... 1) https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3589795/Your-AI-lawyer-IBM-s-ROSS-world-s-artificially-intelligent-attorney.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3589795/Your...

jrussino 2y ago

Thinking about this dispelled my last bit of youthful naivete a few years ago. Won't it be great once we have fully self-driving cars? Heck, I could buy a car and then rent it out to other people like a taxi when I'm not using it, and it would pay for itself. Maybe I could even make a profit! ... If I could make more money than the car costs to purchase and maintain, without any additional work on my part, why would the company sell me the car at that price in the first place rather than just running the taxi service themselves and keeping all of that extra profit?

zellyn 2y ago
Right? Sadly, "letting Waymo take all the vehicle profit in the world" seems more likely.

rcxdude 2y ago

I think you'll find it difficult, given the general attitude the legal system has had to AI anything: lots of things are defined to require a human (see the various attempts to assign copyright or patents to AIs).