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We must not grant AI agents legal personhood

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31–40 of 122 posts

Re: We must not grant AI agents legal personhood

#31
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.

Re: We must not grant AI agents legal personhood

#32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: We must not grant AI agents legal personhood

#33

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?

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!

Re: We must not grant AI agents legal personhood

#34
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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?

Re: We must not grant AI agents legal personhood

#35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

Re: We must not grant AI agents legal personhood

#37
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.

Those copies would be fugitives, though, and need to live life constantly looking over their shoulder.

Re: We must not grant AI agents legal personhood

#39
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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?

Re: We must not grant AI agents legal personhood

#40
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.
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