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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

#91

Post by nekusar »

logicchains wrote: post #29
Animats wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 beh…

> No they don't. If a CEO orders an employee to murder somebody then the employee and CEO will both go to jail;

No, they don't, and that's bullshit. That's NOT how it works.

How it works: "We need to decline 10% more medical claims to make more money for our shareholders. 90% of them won't challenge and many will die, but we make bank on that"

And law is just a legal fiction. Case in point: wage theft is a tort but taking $100 from the till gets the cops summoned and a misdemeanor theft charge. Corporations can and do sway law to their benefit.

Re: We must not grant AI agents legal personhood

#92

Post by SwellJoe »

lrvick wrote: post #87
goatlover wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see no reason to seriously consider that current AI is in any way conscious. It's fun as thought experiment people like to play with. The technology is not some black box, it was designed by humans who understand it well enough to keep building and improving it.

We do not actually know what consciousness is, but we know we have it, in spite of our brains also just being a big blob of simple biological weighted functions that react to the hallucination our brains generate from external sensors we evolved. There is no guarantee other humans even perceive the same simulation we do! The reality is we have no way to measure consciousness or how it emerges, or how to tell if other…

"our brains also just being a big blob of simple biological weighted functions"

Describing the human brain in terms of how LLMs work is an interesting rhetorical tactic.

You don't know how the human brain works, nobody really does, but you have chosen an analogy that supports your position. Which says more about you than anything about whether LLMs should have rights.

Re: We must not grant AI agents legal personhood

#93

Post by WillAdams »

SoftTalker wrote: post #65
WillAdams wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pap…

UPS trucks are custom-built for UPS, and they are destroyed at EOL, not sold off. So, safe to assume any UPS truck you see is owned and operated by UPS.

Yes, but UPS is not the manufacturer, and the version of the story I was told noted that they specifically retained a lawyer to argue that the tickets need not be paid because the manufacturer field was not correctly filled out (why NYC city police weren't able to subpoena that and then inform all their officers of the the name of a manufacturer for a particular VIN was not a part of the story).

Re: We must not grant AI agents legal personhood

#94

Post by eointierney »

We can't, without first granting it to whales, chimps, corvids, and the rest. But we have come very close. The Law is unutterably fucking broken.

In the Republic of Ireland, an artificially wealthy, highly educated, treaty-enmeshed constitutional democracy, the following statement was enshrined:

"4. Marriage may be contracted in accordance with law by two persons without distinction as to their sex."

It doesn't say Natural Persons. My Limited Company has personality but no distinguishable sex.

Thankfully there's the "in accordance with law" phrase so we can sleep ok.

We humans are sleep-walking into ancient nightmares made real through our own curiosity.

What a time to be alive.

Thankfully, there's Mathematics. I made a blackboard today.

Re: We must not grant AI agents legal personhood

#96

Post by [deleted] »

rayiner wrote: post #46
ninalanyon wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do we? Not where I live. Corporations cannot vote, etc. The US is an outlier in granting more rights to corporations than other countries.

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.

[deleted]

Re: We must not grant AI agents legal personhood

#98

Post by lokar »

atmavatar wrote: post #52
logicchains wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

I think you are conflating corporation with limited liability.

Corporations are “people” because they are associations of people. Most of the rights you have as a person also apply to groups of people (for good reasons).

Limited liability is a more simple trade off. They allow for large scale enterprises (generally corporations), as without limited liability if would be too risky.

Re: We must not grant AI agents legal personhood

#99

Post by SoftTalker »

WillAdams wrote: post #93
SoftTalker wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UPS trucks are custom-built for UPS, and they are destroyed at EOL, not sold off. So, safe to assume any UPS truck you see is owned and operated by UPS.

Yes, but UPS is not the manufacturer, and the version of the story I was told noted that they specifically retained a lawyer to argue that the tickets need not be paid because the manufacturer field was not correctly filled out (why NYC city police weren't able to subpoena that and then inform all their officers of the the name of a manufacturer for a particular VIN was not a part of the story).

Judges usually don't take kindly to arguments on technicalities when the facts of the matter are clear (UPS truck, licence # and VIN matching UPS registration and ownership). I'm surprised they prevailed.

Re: We must not grant AI agents legal personhood

#100

Post by WillAdams »

SoftTalker wrote: post #99
WillAdams wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but UPS is not the manufacturer, and the version of the story I was told noted that they specifically retained a lawyer to argue that the tickets need not be paid because the manufacturer field was not correctly filled out (why NYC city police weren't able to subpoena that and then inform all their officers of the the name of a manufacturer for a particular VIN was not a part of the story).

Judges usually don't take kindly to arguments on technicalities when the facts of the matter are clear (UPS truck, licence # and VIN matching UPS registration and ownership). I'm surprised they prevailed.

Maybe they didn't --- it was presented to me as an urban myth, and I've never really liked the idea, and it seems that instead, there is a "Stipulated Fine program", which allows large companies like UPS to waive the right to contest tickets in exchange for agreeing to pay a preset, reduced amount per offense.
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