Armed police swarm student after AI mistakes bag of Doritos for a weapon

> You can't put a corporation in prison. But a person you can. This is one of the big problems.

It really isn't -- we're talking about a category of activities that involves only financial liability or civil torts in the first place, regardless of whether the parties involved are organizations or individuals. You can't put people in prison for civil torts.

Prison is irrelevant to 98% of the discussion here. And the small fraction of cases in the status quo that do involve criminal liability -- even within organizations -- absolutely do assign that liability to specific individuals, and absolutely can involve criminal penalties including jail time. Actual criminal conduct is precisely where the courts "pierce the veil" and hold individuals accountable.

> Even when Boeing knowingly caused the deaths of hundreds (especially the second crash was entirely preventable if they would have been honest after the first one), all they got were some fines.

All anyone would ever get in a lawsuit is some fines. The matter is inherently a civil one. And if there were any indications of criminal conduct, criminal liability can be applied -- as it often is -- to the individuals who engaged in it regardless of whether they are operating within an organization or on their own initiative.

The only real difference is that when you sue a large corporation, you're much more able to actually collect the damages you win than you would be if you were just suing one guy operating by himself. If the aim of justice is remunerative, not just punitive, then this is a much superior situation.

> Those just end up being charged back to their customers, a big one being the government who fined them in the first place.

Who would be paying to settle the matter in your preferred situation? It sounds like the most likely outcome is that the victims would just eat the costs they've already incurred, since there'd be little chance of collecting damages, and taxpayers would bear the burden of paying for the punishment of whomever ends up holding the hot potato after all the scapegoating and blame deflection plays out.

You can try, but you might be unknowingly holding their carefully designated scapegoat responsible instead.

"Everybody loves AI, 23.1 billion internet users couldn't possibly be wrong."

> how do you collect $30M in damages from a single individual

It's not about getting made whole from damages, it's about the incentives for the business owner. A sole proprietor has their own skin fully in the game, whereas an LLC owner does not (only modulo things customarily shielded from bankruptcy like retirement savings and primary dwelling, and asset protection strategies for the extremely rich, like charitable foundations)

> I don't get why so many people are so intent on trying to attribute the motivations to maximize one's own take, deflect blame for harm away from themselves, and cover up their questionable activities to some specific organizational model

Because this specific legal structure (not organizational model, that is orthogonal) is a powerful tool for deflecting blame.

> You're conflating entirely unrelated concepts of liability here... It has nothing to do with legal liability for one's own purposeful conduct, whether tortious or criminal

The point is that these concepts are quite intertwined for small businesses, and only become distinct when there are enough people involved to make a nobody's-fault "group project". Let's say I want to own a piece of rental property and think putting it in an LLC will protect my personal life from all the random things that might happen playing host to other people's lives. Managing one property doesn't take terribly much time so I do it myself. Now it snows, the tenant does a crappy job of shoveling, and someone slips on the sidewalk up front, gets hurt, and sues. Since I'm personally involved in supervising the condition of the property, there is now a theory of personal liability for me that I should have been aware of the poor conditions of the sidewalk. (This same liability applies to the tenant, or anyone that was hired to shovel, but they're usually judgement proof, sympathetic, etc).

Same thing with making repairs to the property, etc - any direct involvement (supplying anything but investment capital) opens up avenues for personal liability, negating the LLC protections.

> The same law of agency and doctrine of vicarious liability applies

The point is that LLC/corporate structures allow for much higher levels of scaling, allowing them to apply higher levels of coercion to their employees. Since these limited liability structures are purely creations of government (rather than something existing outside of government), it's straightforwardly justifiable to regulate what activities they may engage in to mitigate this coercion.

Looks like per their website it did function as intended... It surfaces potential threats for the school to look at and make a human decision. The principal decided to send the police after the school safety team dismissed it as part of the correct process. I mean fire alarms go off for lots of things that are not fire alarms... This was an alert meant to be validated by a human that messed up.

Its pretty clearly documented how it works here:

https://www.omnilert.com/solutions/gun-detection-system https://www.omnilert.com/solutions/ai-gun-detection https://www.omnilert.com/solutions/professional-monitoring