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We must not grant AI agents legal personhood

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Re: We must not grant AI agents legal personhood

#21

Post by ninalanyon »

watwut wrote: post #15
morkalork wrote: post #10

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?

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".

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.

Re: We must not grant AI agents legal personhood

#22

Post by narrator »

andsoitis wrote: post #4
newsomix9xl wrote: post #2

"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 a…

The difference is humans can be held accountable. An AI cannot.

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.

Re: We must not grant AI agents legal personhood

#23

Post by Animats »

nekusar wrote: post #13

Why not? We give full pershood to corporations. Those are also legal fictions.

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.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/1970/09/13/archives/a-friedman-doctr...

Re: We must not grant AI agents legal personhood

#25

Post by warkdarrior »

andsoitis wrote: post #8
newsomix9xl wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: We must not grant AI agents legal personhood

#27

Post by logicchains »

nekusar wrote: post #13

Why not? We give full pershood to corporations. Those are also legal fictions.

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.

Re: We must not grant AI agents legal personhood

#28

Post by debazel »

andsoitis wrote: post #8
newsomix9xl wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Is it really anymore dangerous than having minimum wage workers serving as fall guys for approving prompts they have no understanding over?

Re: We must not grant AI agents legal personhood

#29

Post by logicchains »

Animats wrote: post #23
nekusar wrote: post #13

Why not? We give full pershood to corporations. Those are also legal fictions.

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…

>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.

Re: We must not grant AI agents legal personhood

#30

Post by darth_avocado »

nekusar wrote: post #13

Why not? We give full pershood to corporations. Those are also legal fictions.

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.

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