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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

#111

Post by imartin2k »

We should reserve the term “consciousness” for biologicals organisms, and if needed, come up with a new term and definition for machines. That way, we don’t risk bringing all the moral values, ethics, norms, and associated emotional baggage we apply to humans, into the machine realm. Because that would move us closer to becoming enslaved by the machines, and their owners (“no you cannot turn off that data center, it would mean murdering the ai”).

Sadly, my sense is that some of the AI-pilled people are longing for that kind of enslavement. Not unlike how billions are submitting themselves to god and religion. It’s probably evolutionary hardwired to seek this out.

Re: We must not grant AI agents legal personhood

#112

Post by sph »

scarmig wrote: post #105
tambeb wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, nobody has a cohesive theory of consciousness. At the same time I can say with 100% certainty that LLMs (or any current "AI") is in any way, shape, or form, conscious. Not even close. A decade or two ago it was the Internet that was a possible emerging consciousness.

Why? What makes you so absolutely certain? 100% is a lot, which implies you do have at least some privileged understanding of consciousness.

As usual, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

The onus to prove LLMs are conscious is on you making the claim. And if you say we don’t even know what consciousness is, how can you then attribute to an entity?

Definitionally and philosophically, humans are conscious (Descartes et al.) so need no proof themselves

Re: We must not grant AI agents legal personhood

#113

Post by scarmig »

sph wrote: post #112
scarmig wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? What makes you so absolutely certain? 100% is a lot, which implies you do have at least some privileged understanding of consciousness.

As usual, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The onus to prove LLMs are conscious is on you making the claim. And if you say we don’t even know what consciousness is, how can you then attribute to an entity? Definitionally and philosophically, humans are conscious (Descartes et al.) so need no proof themselves

That's a pretty crass attempt to shift the burden of proof. You're stating that LLMs are definitively not conscious and never could be; I'm saying we should approach the question with a sense of humility and agnosticism since we know so little about consciousness.

And it's unclear what your actual argument about the nature of consciousness is, aside from what seems like a bald assertion that humans are the only conscious beings.

Re: We must not grant AI agents legal personhood

#116

Post by hyperman1 »

logicchains wrote: post #31
ruined wrote: post #11

we already have a mechanism to establish artificial persons, it is called incorporation.

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.

A corporation can own another corporation. So if you set up a loop of corporations owning other corporations, and the loop spans multiple countries, you can end up with a corporation ultimately owning itself. I vaguely remember IKEA trying to get this structure.

Re: We must not grant AI agents legal personhood

#117

Post by ninalanyon »

lukeschlather wrote: post #39
ninalanyon wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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?

So they were cited. So what? When you are extremely wealthy fixed penalties become simply part of the cost of doing business. Now if the fine were a substantial fraction of income it might make some sense, as is done for speeding fines in Scandinavia.

But unless you hold the chief executive and the principal investors personally liable the commons will be exploited always. Fines are supposed to correct one's behaviour by making one suffer and that does not happen if you fine a corporation unless the fine is large enough to affect the top management and the investors; this only happens if the fine is so large as to risk destroying the company.

Re: We must not grant AI agents legal personhood

#118

Post by ninalanyon »

scarmig wrote: post #60
SwellJoe wrote: post #36

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.

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.

Consciousness is also not necessarily relevant. Once machines start to influence the design of new machines in ways that are hard to examine in detail they can gain capabilities that are unexpected and unwanted.

Machines capable of this kind of influence and of concealing capabilities will naturally become more common simply through a combination of natural and artificial selection. No consciousness is required for such entities to become competitors.

For an examination of the idea of intelligence without consciousness see Peter Watts' Blindsight.

Re: We must not grant AI agents legal personhood

#119

Post by ninalanyon »

eesmith wrote: post #48
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.

"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.

If personhood can be applied even to something without volition then it has become such an all encompassing notion as to be essentially meaningless because when using it one will have to surround it with moat of caveats,

Re: We must not grant AI agents legal personhood

#120

Post by eesmith »

ninalanyon wrote: post #119
eesmith wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

If personhood can be applied even to something without volition then it has become such an all encompassing notion as to be essentially meaningless because when using it one will have to surround it with moat of caveats,

Yes, the intro paragraph at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personhood highlights how it's a controversial subject.

You are, I presume, arguing that companies should not have personhood.

I think any definition is going to have caveats. When does a fetus gain volition? Does someone in an irreversible permanent vegetative state lose personhood? Do apes or cetaceans have volition and thus personhood?

The Wikipedia page also points out that "volition" comes from a certain Western philosophical viewpoint, but other philosophies have a different idea of what personhood means.

In any case, "personhood" doesn't mean that all persons have equal legal rights. A 10 year old has personhood but, for example, cannot vote.

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