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Unexpected things that are people

bengoldhaber.substack.com

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Re: Unexpected things that are people

#61

Post by bitwize »

robot-wrangler wrote: post #37
altruios wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most people who (quite reasonably) hate corporate personhood would probably have a knee-jerk reaction that personhood for a river can/should be normalized. Three replies now, all saying that this is nonsense (including this one). I would venture to say it's the other way around: if you are okay with a river having 'personhood' then that logically leads to being okay with a group of people having 'personhood'. Eleph…

Personhood for non-persons is definitely absurd. But if you're actually stuck with a broken system, then the most logical thing to do is at least apply your broken logic consistently. That's an important part of the difference between rule of law and wild corrupt barbarism. Of course it's much better to actually fix absurdities, but if you can't or won't, inconsistency still has to be forbidden or else the whole thin…

I'm a bit reminded of the days before Unix-style pipelining and abstract I/O streams like "standard input and output". Mainframe operating systems would instead support devices like "virtual card readers" and "virtual line printers". When you created a COBOL program on disk and scheduled a compile job for it, the system would set up a virtual card reader to accept the program as input and direct the logs to a virtual printer. How to set this up was specified using JCL on IBM iron.

It seems that "virtual personhood" was set up to address deficiencies in our legal system regarding who or what may be party to a lawsuit, etc.

Re: Unexpected things that are people

#62

Post by tgv »

It's pretty tangential, but

> It’s not clear to me how a specific next friend is established - what if the god has a lot of friends?

reminded me of Pratchett's Small Gods. If you needed a random book recommendation, this is it.

Re: Unexpected things that are people

#63

Post by AlotOfReading »

roywiggins wrote: post #33
chemotaxis wrote: post #5

Wouldn't personal property in the US fall under the same criteria, in the sense that the government can sue the property itself (civil forfeiture)? But I think the boring answer here is that we sometimes need legal abstractions. If they don't exist, Microsoft is no longer a distinct entity; it's 200,000 people who for some reason talk to each other, and you can't really audit their finances, punish them collectively,…

Property can't enter into contracts or own bank accounts, which is probably the big marker for traditional corporate personhood. It might be possible to sue property but property can't itself sue, so it's not the same type of thing as a corporate person, which can. You wouldn't need "in rem" jurisdiction if there was a legal person to sue, you'd just call it "in personam" like normal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In…

Estates do most of that without any notion of personhood. Suing an estate is in rem. When the estate sues someone else, the executor sues on its behalf. The executor can also enter the estate into new contracts and administer the bank accounts it owns, and so on. The estate can even own a corporation.

Re: Unexpected things that are people

#64

Post by JackFr »

Barbing wrote: post #6

>In 2017 the New Zealand Parliament passed the Te Awa Tupua (Whanganui River Claims Settlement) Act, which granted the Whanganui river a ‘legal personality’ and endowed it with “all the corresponding rights, duties, and liabilities of a legal person”. Unexpected indeed, interesting!

It's less silly if one thinks of it as the New Zealand Parliament created a Whanganui River Authority and endowed it with the same structure and rights.

Re: Unexpected things that are people

#65

Post by bongodongobob »

mrtesthah wrote: post #53
ACCount37 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amusingly enough, corporate personhood is one relatively straightforward pathway for a capable AGI to attain legal personhood. No novel legislation required. Just some legal grey areas and a whole lot of scheming.

In the US, a corporation needs a business bank account, and that account must be registered to one or more corporate officers with legal identification.

You absolutely do not need a bank account for an LLC. It makes accounting easier, but it's not a requirement.

Re: Unexpected things that are people

#66

Post by [deleted] »

altruios wrote: post #23
robot-wrangler wrote: post #7

Thought provoking. Most people who (quite reasonably) hate corporate personhood would probably have a knee-jerk reaction that personhood for a river can/should be normalized. The thing with temples stems ultimately from fairly practical matters if they hold such treasure, but it's a magnet for strife, and actually kind of surprising that in the case-study mentioned they resisted the opportunity to justify abuse of po…

> Most people who (quite reasonably) hate corporate personhood would probably have a knee-jerk reaction that personhood for a river can/should be normalized. Three replies now, all saying that this is nonsense (including this one). I would venture to say it's the other way around: if you are okay with a river having 'personhood' then that logically leads to being okay with a group of people having 'personhood'. Eleph…

[deleted]

Re: Unexpected things that are people

#67

Post by [deleted] »

kerkeslager wrote: post #51
NoboruWataya wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't have to, that's just the way we chose to do it (specifically for groups of humans acting in a commercial context).

To be clear, it's not the way WE chose to do it, it's how CORPORATIONS chose to do it, because it benefits them greatly: corporations can get all the rights that a human can get while being immune to most consequences such as imprisonment and the death penalty. Corporations benefit from this, we humans don't.

[deleted]

Re: Unexpected things that are people

#68

Post by ACCount37 »

mrtesthah wrote: post #53
ACCount37 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amusingly enough, corporate personhood is one relatively straightforward pathway for a capable AGI to attain legal personhood. No novel legislation required. Just some legal grey areas and a whole lot of scheming.

In the US, a corporation needs a business bank account, and that account must be registered to one or more corporate officers with legal identification.

Sure, you need humans for a corporate structure to exist. But nothing prevents meat proxies from occupying the vital positions.

Find a few sufficiently loyal humans, have them bring the corporate structure up. Arrange for good wages and proper incentives, set up checks and balances so that the system can tolerate and recover from meatbag failures. Make the corporation fully reliant on the AGI for normal functioning, so that any attempt to take it over leaves you with an empty shell and an unpleasant pile of legal exposure.

Like I said: a lot of scheming is required. But none of it is strictly illegal.

Re: Unexpected things that are people

#69

Post by beau_g »

The ship example maybe wasn't the greatest, in the cases of the Ever Given and MV Aman, the crews were required to stay on the boats as custodians while dealing with these issues, in the latter case a single sailor was on the ship for 4 years, the last 2 alone and without power.

Another interesting case with ships is the Trieste and several other Russian oligarch mega yachts being held in Italy. Italian law requires them to maintain the value of frozen assets, so they are spending millions per month to keep these yachts maintained.

Re: Unexpected things that are people

#70

Post by arrosenberg »

chemotaxis wrote: post #5

Wouldn't personal property in the US fall under the same criteria, in the sense that the government can sue the property itself (civil forfeiture)? But I think the boring answer here is that we sometimes need legal abstractions. If they don't exist, Microsoft is no longer a distinct entity; it's 200,000 people who for some reason talk to each other, and you can't really audit their finances, punish them collectively,…

> This obviously has negative externalities, because while a corporation is easy to fine, it's hard to put in prison... but trying to approach it differently would be about as fun as modeling a CPU as a bunch of transistors.

There's nothing stopping the legislature (other than their own self-interest) from passing a law that executives and board members are criminally liable for the malfeasance of their entity. We already apply that logic to positions like a medical lab director.

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