we already have a mechanism to establish artificial persons, it is called incorporation.
If I smooshed a gun and an AI agent together and it happened to shoot someone, who would be responsible? How is this being considère? Or are we going to go back to the medieval times of animal trials and taking inanimate objects to court.
> In civil forfeiture, assets are seized by police based on a suspicion of wrongdoing, and without having to charge a person with specific wrongdoing, with the case being between police and the thing itself, sometimes referred to by the Latin term in rem, meaning "against the property"; the property itself is the defendant and no criminal charge against the owner is needed.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_forfeiture_in_the_United_States#Civil_vs_criminal_forfeiture" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_forfeiture_in_the_United...</a>
You would be responsible.<p>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".
Why not? We give full pershood to corporations. Those are also legal fictions.
That's the key issue here. AI forces a re-examination of corporate personhood and corporate responsibility.<p>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. Friedman ends with "There is one and only one social responsibility of business — to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.”<p>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.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1970/09/13/archives/a-friedman-doctrine-the-social-responsibility-of-business-is-to.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/1970/09/13/archives/a-friedman-doctr...</a>
But we also must not grant AI liabilities to large corporations.<p>As such, all AIs will now be granted as child of the least lawyered up class of society. Poor people.
"Last year, Berkeley-based non-profit Palisade Research published a study showing the lengths that advanced AI models will often go to achieve their goals. While playing against a powerful chess engine, models from both OpenAI and China’s DeepSeek frequently decided to cheat if it looked as if they were going to otherwise lose. By hacking the game environment, they could alter the result in their favour." -from the article<p>We're supposed to deny AI rights because it might cheat.<p>But <i>humans cheat all the time</i>.<p>We survived cheating humans, why can't we survive cheating AI?<p>Cheating is the problem: not who does it.
The difference is humans can be held accountable. An AI cannot.
[delayed]
"A corporation cannot" didn't stop legal birth of those
> "A corporation cannot" didn't stop legal birth of those<p>In a corporation, the humans running it can be punished. An AI cannot be punished.
That's an indictment of contemporary capitalism, not a precedent to follow.
That's not true. Humans write AI, and humans can held responsible for writing bad software.<p>And corporations already create fictions that are held accountable in lieu of peoples private assets.<p>So, I disagree.
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.<p>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.
"A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision." —- internal 1979 IBM training manual<p>> Cheating is the problem: not who does it.<p>Accountability is the problem. Without accountability, there are no incentives to encourage less harmful behavior. AI has no rights, it is just code executing.
If we ban AI for cheating but let human cheating go unchecked how does that solve the problem of cheating?<p>And I'm 100% sure managers are right now using AI to make decisions, or even cheat, IBM training manual wisdom not withstanding.