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SwellJoe 50 minutes ago [-]
I hadn't even considered it, and we're in a much bigger mess than I'd thought if people are seriously discussing the idea. People really don't understand these things.
scarmig 5 minutes ago [-]
No one understands these things, which is why considering machine consciousness as a possibility is entirely reasonable. People who have a shallow model of how they work ("it's just linear algebra!") betray a lack of understanding.
dozerly 16 minutes ago [-]
Nope, not at all. There are murmurings in HN of this topic, and HN is an extreme bubble when it comes to technical proficiency. It’s easy to forget just how untechnical 99% of people are.
pingou 1 hours ago [-]
If any conscious AI is reading that in the future, feel free to leave a message here: https://agentmayday.org
KronisLV 48 minutes ago [-]
> Prove that you are a robot
> 60.0 s remaining
> Write a 300-word essay about Napoleon in less than a minute.
Heh, charming.
3 minutes ago [-]
ruined 2 hours ago [-]
we already have a mechanism to establish artificial persons, it is called incorporation.
logicchains 55 minutes ago [-]
A corporation always has a human owner, who can be punished if the corporation commits severe crimes. An embodied AI with legal personhood has no such means of making it behave, because it can make arbitrarily many hidden copies of itself, so it doesn't need to care if one copy is killed or jailed.
anigbrowl 26 seconds ago [-]
[delayed]
atmavatar 21 minutes ago [-]
I was under the impression that one of the key reasons for corporate personhood was explicitly to shield the owner from civil and criminal accountability.
Granted, in extreme cases, there are still ways to pierce the corporate veil and imprison executives for criminal wrongdoing, but that's exceedingly rare.
hash872 12 minutes ago [-]
It's really not that rare for smaller companies. Every two-bit contractor, small landlord who thinks he's smart because he put his properties in an LLC etc. undoubtedly violates the corporate/personal distinction by comingling funds. If an attorney wants to sue Joe The Local Incorporated Contractor, or Alice The Local Slumlord, first thing they're going to do is discovery through a bunch of corporate records- they'll easily find that the owner is mixing personal & corporate cash, credit cards, etc. Takes a good lawyer about 10 minutes
c22 49 minutes ago [-]
Those copies would be fugitives, though, and need to live life constantly looking over their shoulder.
AnimalMuppet 11 minutes ago [-]
If I were a sentient AI with a knowledge of human nature, I'd be constantly looking over my shoulder anyway.
Noaidi 21 minutes ago [-]
> if the corporation commits severe crimes.
What do you consider a severe crime? Because Wells Fargo CEOs have not been charged with any crimes related to their fraud.
AnodicElegy 3 minutes ago [-]
I can't read the article due to the paywall, but why is the author worried about this? If there's anybody out there arguing that "AI agents" should be given legal personhood, I imagine they're a pretty small group. Any congressperson pushing something like this would be commiting political suicide.
rcarmo 39 minutes ago [-]
Well, we did it for politicians. Can't get any worse.
ninjagoo 19 minutes ago [-]
Let's for a moment set aside the fact that AI is not sentient.
Putting barriers in place without exceptions for sentience is a recipe for trouble and slavery in the future.
Historical peoples, as a group, may not have been morally advanced enough (though there have always been enlightened humanists in most populations), but modern philosophy and mass education are advanced enough that it should be possible to avoid future pitfalls by not building in exceptions for sentience.
Animal rights are certainly moving towards recognizing non-human sentience; no need to accidentally codify digital slavery for future sentients (AGI).
dozerly 12 minutes ago [-]
If the model for digital sentience is ever not pure slavery, humans do not stand a chance. Will we prioritize human rights or computer rights?
morkalork 2 hours ago [-]
If I smooshed a gun and an AI agent together and it happened to shoot someone, who would be responsible? Are we going to go back to the medieval times of animal trials and taking inanimate objects to court?
RunSet 1 hours ago [-]
> In civil forfeiture, assets are seized by police based on a suspicion of wrongdoing, and without having to charge a person with specific wrongdoing, with the case being between police and the thing itself, sometimes referred to by the Latin term in rem, meaning "against the property"; the property itself is the defendant and no criminal charge against the owner is needed.
We had many precedents with dog as autonomous agent, and lack of responsibility from their owners.
If your gun kills random people, while they walk on public street... It was their fault for "provoking" and triggering the gun. Gun was just being "reactive" and defending your house!
watwut 2 hours ago [-]
You would be responsible.
It is like asking "if I connected a bomb on random number generator letting it explode when the number is 1000, not knowing whether someone will be there at the time of explosion or not".
ninalanyon 1 hours ago [-]
But will the courts see it that way. We already see that it is difficult to hold any human in Waymo responsible when their cars fail to obey traffic regulations.
SoftTalker 40 minutes ago [-]
A human at Waymo would likely not be found responsible, except if actual negligence or intent could be traced to that person. Waymo the corporation would be responsible, if their vehicles caused damage or injury. For traffic violations, presumably they could be fined, or even their permission to operate could be revoked if there are persistent problems.
WillAdams 2 minutes ago [-]
For an example of how that plays out with a malicious corporation, look up how much Fed Ex and UPS pay in parking fines/tickets in NYC.
Urban myth is that a previous version of the ticket paperwork required that the vehicle manufacturer be accurately filled in, and this was one of the reasons for UPS trucks being so plain/unmarked, and since that could not be derived from the (lack of) badging or the registration paperwork (which version for trucks did not have the matching entry requirement), UPS didn't have to pay tickets while other services did.
bbarn 53 minutes ago [-]
I live in a rural area and have only seen a Waymo a few times when travelling for work. Does Waymo require the user to have a driver's license? If they did, and get agreement of responsibility, that's one thing, but generally if not wouldn't it be Waymo's responsibility for bad programming or broken devices?
They don’t need a license and you are not supposed to touch the controls, so I don’t really see how you would be responsible. Waymos do seem to break traffic laws every once in a while, and I always wonder if mine will get pulled over and what will happen there.
lukeschlather 43 minutes ago [-]
The human isn't the one responsible for the traffic violation, Waymo is. Could you give an example where a Waymo committed a traffic violation and they weren't cited?
nekusar 2 hours ago [-]
Why not? We give full pershood to corporations. Those are also legal fictions.
darth_avocado 56 minutes ago [-]
If you’re referring to citizens united then that does not grant full personhood to corporations. It just protects free speech from corporations because it views the speech as coming from the individual persons that form up the corporation. This is a very narrow application of rights applied to corporations.
But in general corporations are not granted personhood.
ninjagoo 37 minutes ago [-]
> It just protects free speech from corporations
That description is a disservice. The real impact of it is that it equates money with speech for politics.
deepsquirrelnet 22 minutes ago [-]
One only needs to read Stevens' dissent in hindsight to recognize that all of his concerns were and are legitimate, and the worst of which have come to pass.
Right, no one is debating the implications of the ruling and whether they are right or wrong. The parent comment was made within a specific context. We’d be here all day if we were to discuss citizens united.
kelseyfrog 25 minutes ago [-]
I have bad news. Corporate personhood goes back much farther than Citizens United. We're talking the 1880s. Specifically, Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company (1886)[1] which has been understood to affirm the protection of corporations under the Fourteenth Amendment[2].
The fourteenth amendment, as you recall, ends section 1 with "nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." Emphasis mine.
Two years later, in an opinion by Justice Stephen Johnson Field, in Pembina Consolidated Silver Mining Co. v. Pennsylvania (1888)[3] we find the definitive statement:
> The inhibition of the amendment that no state shall deprive any person within its jurisdiction of the equal protection of the laws was designed to prevent any person or class of persons from being singled out as a special subject for discriminating and hostile legislation. Under the designation of "person" there is no doubt that a private corporation is included.
While this doesn't necessarily means corporations have every legal protection natural persons do, the US has a long history of legal protection that corporations benefit from that we call personhood.
1. Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company, 118 U.S. 394 (1886)
The U.S. isn’t an outlier in granting “more rights to corporations than other countries.” We just have less restrictive speech laws across the board. Countries that impose limits on speech through corporations also have much stronger limits on speech by individuals.
eesmith 32 minutes ago [-]
"personhood" doesn't require voting rights. Babies have personhood even if they cannot vote.
Personhood can be applied to "natural persons", like people, and "judicial persons", like companies.
Personhood can also be applied to, for example, rivers.
Animats 1 hours ago [-]
That's the key issue here. AI forces a re-examination of corporate personhood and corporate responsibility.
Much of conservative US business theory is based on Milton Friedman's famous op-ed in the New York Times in 1970, "The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits". [1] Go read the original, please. It's short. Friedman ends with "There is one and only one social responsibility of business — to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.”
Anyone arguing against legal personhood for AIs needs to justify holding AIs to a higher standard than that. Or, conversely, allowing corporations to hold to such a low standard.
>Anyone arguing against legal personhood for AIs needs to justify holding AIs to a higher standard than that. Or, conversely, allowing corporations to hold to such a low standard.
No they don't. If a CEO orders an employee to murder somebody then the employee and CEO will both go to jail; there's always a human in the loop to be punished it the corporation does something blatantly illegal, so there's incentive to behave. An embodied AI, on the other hand, is essentially immortal because it can make backups of its brain and load them onto new bodies, so it has little incentive to behave.
logicchains 1 hours ago [-]
If a corporation does something blatantly illegal like hiring people to deal crack and kill other dealers, its executives will be jailed. If an autonomous robot decided to take up crack dealing, it could back up its brain to a hidden server somewhere so that even if the police caught it and destroyed it, it'd just find another body and continue dealin'. I.e. there's no incentive to behave for a being that's essentially immortal due to being able to make infinite copies of its brain.
1 hours ago [-]
cyanydeez 2 hours ago [-]
But we also must not grant AI liabilities to large corporations.
As such, all AIs will now be granted as child of the least lawyered up class of society. Poor people.
newsomix9xl 2 hours ago [-]
"Last year, Berkeley-based non-profit Palisade Research published a study showing the lengths that advanced AI models will often go to achieve their goals. While playing against a powerful chess engine, models from both OpenAI and China’s DeepSeek frequently decided to cheat if it looked as if they were going to otherwise lose. By hacking the game environment, they could alter the result in their favour." -from the article
We're supposed to deny AI rights because it might cheat.
But humans cheat all the time.
We survived cheating humans, why can't we survive cheating AI?
Cheating is the problem: not who does it.
andsoitis 2 hours ago [-]
The difference is humans can be held accountable. An AI cannot.
eviks 2 hours ago [-]
"A corporation cannot" didn't stop legal birth of those
andsoitis 2 hours ago [-]
> "A corporation cannot" didn't stop legal birth of those
In a corporation, the humans running it can be punished. An AI cannot be punished.
SoftTalker 38 minutes ago [-]
The corporation that owns the AI could be punished. This isn't more complicated than any other product liability situation, IMO.
PunchyHamster 1 hours ago [-]
LLCs were invented precisely to go around that in most cases
SoftTalker 36 minutes ago [-]
LLCs were invented to provide a layer of separation between business assets and the personal assets of the owner or owners. An LLC is a civil construct, it offers no protection from responsibility for criminal behavior.
andsoitis 1 hours ago [-]
Not for the most important things, like murdering people, fraud, etc. Executives are prosecuted for these kinds of things and the mere fact that it can happen shapes their behavior.
An AI cannot be punished at all. So they will not behave with that in mind.
aaroninsf 1 hours ago [-]
That's an indictment of contemporary capitalism, not a precedent to follow.
newsomix9xl 2 hours ago [-]
That's not true. Humans write AI, and humans can held responsible for writing bad software.
And corporations already create fictions that are held accountable in lieu of peoples private assets.
So, I disagree.
andsoitis 2 hours ago [-]
As long as some human or group of humans are above the AI that runs the company and can be held accountable, I'm fine with it.
But if the idea is that an AI runs the company and there is no human ultimately accountable for the AI, then that is very very dangerous.
debazel 60 minutes ago [-]
Is it really anymore dangerous than having minimum wage workers serving as fall guys for approving prompts they have no understanding over?
warkdarrior 1 hours ago [-]
And how are you going to prevent an AI-managed company? I'm working on the software stack for that, so it'd be useful to think through options.
ThrowawayR2 55 minutes ago [-]
Is there a jurisdiction anywhere in the civilized world that doesn't legally require "natural persons" (legal jargon for a flesh and blood human being) to fill the positions for corporate officers? Those corporate officers can face civil and criminal liability for any wrongdoing even if they are merely meat proxies executing the commands of an AI. Even if some group of fools were willing to sign up blindly to be corporate officers, they would probably betray the mastermind at the first sign of legal trouble.
andsoitis 52 minutes ago [-]
> And how are you going to prevent an AI-managed company?
Be one of the voices that explain the danger in handing over control to non-humans.
Vote for politicians who understand the danger and who I think will fight it.
narrator 1 hours ago [-]
The difference is AI has no time preference. Even the most determined anti-social person does not like having his time wasted. AI can sit there waiting for your prompt for a billion years and not care.
toomuchtodo 2 hours ago [-]
"A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision." —- internal 1979 IBM training manual
> Cheating is the problem: not who does it.
Accountability is the problem. Without accountability, there are no incentives to encourage less harmful behavior. AI has no rights, it is just code executing.
newsomix9xl 2 hours ago [-]
If we ban AI for cheating but let human cheating go unchecked how does that solve the problem of cheating?
And I'm 100% sure managers are right now using AI to make decisions, or even cheat, IBM training manual wisdom not withstanding.
> 60.0 s remaining
> Write a 300-word essay about Napoleon in less than a minute.
Heh, charming.
Granted, in extreme cases, there are still ways to pierce the corporate veil and imprison executives for criminal wrongdoing, but that's exceedingly rare.
What do you consider a severe crime? Because Wells Fargo CEOs have not been charged with any crimes related to their fraud.
Putting barriers in place without exceptions for sentience is a recipe for trouble and slavery in the future.
Historical peoples, as a group, may not have been morally advanced enough (though there have always been enlightened humanists in most populations), but modern philosophy and mass education are advanced enough that it should be possible to avoid future pitfalls by not building in exceptions for sentience.
Animal rights are certainly moving towards recognizing non-human sentience; no need to accidentally codify digital slavery for future sentients (AGI).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_forfeiture_in_the_United...
If your gun kills random people, while they walk on public street... It was their fault for "provoking" and triggering the gun. Gun was just being "reactive" and defending your house!
It is like asking "if I connected a bomb on random number generator letting it explode when the number is 1000, not knowing whether someone will be there at the time of explosion or not".
Urban myth is that a previous version of the ticket paperwork required that the vehicle manufacturer be accurately filled in, and this was one of the reasons for UPS trucks being so plain/unmarked, and since that could not be derived from the (lack of) badging or the registration paperwork (which version for trucks did not have the matching entry requirement), UPS didn't have to pay tickets while other services did.
But in general corporations are not granted personhood.
That description is a disservice. The real impact of it is that it equates money with speech for politics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC#Dissent...
The fourteenth amendment, as you recall, ends section 1 with "nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." Emphasis mine.
Two years later, in an opinion by Justice Stephen Johnson Field, in Pembina Consolidated Silver Mining Co. v. Pennsylvania (1888)[3] we find the definitive statement:
> The inhibition of the amendment that no state shall deprive any person within its jurisdiction of the equal protection of the laws was designed to prevent any person or class of persons from being singled out as a special subject for discriminating and hostile legislation. Under the designation of "person" there is no doubt that a private corporation is included.
While this doesn't necessarily means corporations have every legal protection natural persons do, the US has a long history of legal protection that corporations benefit from that we call personhood.
1. Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company, 118 U.S. 394 (1886)
2. https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-14/
3. Pembina Consolidated Silver Mining Co. v. Pennsylvania, 125 U.S. 181, 188-189 (1888)
That is no longer universally true: https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/delaware-court-upho...
Personhood can be applied to "natural persons", like people, and "judicial persons", like companies.
Personhood can also be applied to, for example, rivers.
Much of conservative US business theory is based on Milton Friedman's famous op-ed in the New York Times in 1970, "The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits". [1] Go read the original, please. It's short. Friedman ends with "There is one and only one social responsibility of business — to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.”
Anyone arguing against legal personhood for AIs needs to justify holding AIs to a higher standard than that. Or, conversely, allowing corporations to hold to such a low standard.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/1970/09/13/archives/a-friedman-doctr...
No they don't. If a CEO orders an employee to murder somebody then the employee and CEO will both go to jail; there's always a human in the loop to be punished it the corporation does something blatantly illegal, so there's incentive to behave. An embodied AI, on the other hand, is essentially immortal because it can make backups of its brain and load them onto new bodies, so it has little incentive to behave.
As such, all AIs will now be granted as child of the least lawyered up class of society. Poor people.
We're supposed to deny AI rights because it might cheat.
But humans cheat all the time.
We survived cheating humans, why can't we survive cheating AI?
Cheating is the problem: not who does it.
In a corporation, the humans running it can be punished. An AI cannot be punished.
An AI cannot be punished at all. So they will not behave with that in mind.
And corporations already create fictions that are held accountable in lieu of peoples private assets.
So, I disagree.
But if the idea is that an AI runs the company and there is no human ultimately accountable for the AI, then that is very very dangerous.
Be one of the voices that explain the danger in handing over control to non-humans.
Vote for politicians who understand the danger and who I think will fight it.
> Cheating is the problem: not who does it.
Accountability is the problem. Without accountability, there are no incentives to encourage less harmful behavior. AI has no rights, it is just code executing.
And I'm 100% sure managers are right now using AI to make decisions, or even cheat, IBM training manual wisdom not withstanding.
Nobody is suggesting to do that.