Criminal and Civil liability are the two topics to focus on - you will find that non-human entities have very limited categories of crimes that apply to them. This is a key topic in the emergence of 'seemingly conscious' or 'seemingly unitary' AGI compute entities.
Also worth noting that Common Law tends to be the primary mode of law globally, even in counties that are nominally Code Napoleon (aka Civil Law) countries.
No novel legislation required. Just some legal grey areas and a whole lot of scheming.
You get the corporate entity first, and this is required to get the bank account.
So, if the bank account was required to get the corporate entity formed, none would ever be formed, as the bank acct and the corporate authorization would forever be waiting for the other prerequisite to be complete.
And no, AFAICT, there is no hard requirement for a bank account to maintain a corporation, although in practice it would make doing almost everything quite inconvenient.
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.
In any event, the law tends to be responsive about establishing doctrines for extending liability to individuals involved, like piercing the corporate veil, principles of partnership, or a statutory regime (like CERCLA).
(Ref: http://www.accelerando.org/fiction/accelerando/accelerando.h...)
Why do you say this?
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, or set any ground rules that apply specifically to their joint activities.
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.
You wouldn't need "in rem" jurisdiction if there was a legal person to sue, you'd just call it "in personam" like normal.
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.
The problem is just that the board can usually claim they did not know, and that they have deep pockets to afford good attorneys. To get around the first thing, you have strict liability laws.
Strict liability laws, though, are how you end up with the situation where barkeepers are criminally liable for selling alcohol to underage people, even if they could not have known the buyer was underage (and that's about the only instance of strict liability in criminal law). I personally find this very unjust and would rather that strict liability was not part of criminal law.
Unexpected indeed, interesting!
Historically and practically speaking, I get the impression that the boat stuff seems the least controversial and makes the most sense. Incoherent to want to sue a river for flooding, but if a boat crashes into your house for example, then you'd like to be able to at least seize the boat without enduring the back-and-forth deflection between owners and operators.
I would have thought that people who hate the idea of corporate personhood would also hate the idea of any other kind of non-person personhood.
Why do you think this would be the case? I agree with the former but not the latter.
The more logical reason is that if corporate personhood sucks and we have it anyway, then like it or not, now we need to extend it elsewhere just to level the playing field. If anti-environmental interests can hide behind it as a justification that makes their fight easier, then let the environmental interests do the same thing.
Ok if we are already extending personhood to corporations, who with their sheer power transcend individuals, why not also extend that fiction to other entities that would actually need active protection?
Wouldn't corporations do just fine and we would live in a better world if we stripped any form of personhood from corporations? The biggest collision area stemming from corporate personhood is its collision with other, actual persons. The only reason corporate personhood is a thing is because it allows corporate lawyers to pick from a bigger pool of personal rights in a perversion of the spirit of these original rights. Thus watering down the existing right.
Not at all. It allows corporations to own property, enter contracts and appear as a plaintiff or defendant in lawsuits. Without legal personhood it could do none of these.
And yet these things do basically go all the way back to the Roman empire, and I'm sure the extent and privileges of corporate personhood have been litigated once or twice since then. If you disagree that
> corporate lawyers would like to pick from a bigger pool of personal rights in a perversion of the spirit of these original rights.
then what do you think they were working on?
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'.
Elephants, on the other hand, have a better case for 'personhood' than a river. An elephant has autonomy, is thinking, can feel pain, has emotions... a river has none of these things, nor does a corporation (even if the parts {humans} consisting of a corporation do).
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.
NYTimes: In Move to Protect Whales, Polynesian Indigenous Groups Give Them ‘Personhood’ https://archive.is/H5fq8
Nat Geo: This Canadian river is now legally a person. It’s not the only one. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/travel/article/these-rive...
I wonder how our mental model of nature will evolve over the next decades. For example, in the early 1900's, the United States had more laws protecting animals from overwork than it did for children. That feels unfathomable in today's United States, where animals are treated more as property than people. Perhaps something similar will happen, where we will understand everything as a "legal entity" that has protections.
Most people understand that incorporated businesses need to own property, enter into contracts and act as either plaintiff or defendant in lawsuits.
Don't forget that one. All the rights, none of the responsibility.
In other words, why do we have to make something a person in order to give it rights?
Corporations benefit from this, we humans don't.
Well, one protects nature, the other protects profits. They are not the same thing.
Plus, if corporations get to be people for all the good stuff, it should require taking the bad bits too. E.g. capital punishment should be on the table.
Straw man argument.
I'm for regulating different things differently and as what they are: a corporation should be regulated as a corporation and a river should be regulated as a river.
More likely, HN simply has the same distribution of intelligence (i.e., it's mostly near-average-intelligence people), and HN's members are just as susceptible to the same obvious propaganda as everyone else, especially when it might benefit you. HN is full of people who believe they're future rich people, so anything that benefits the rich is easy for HN folks to believe.
Throw in a bit of flattery for a bunch of people whose self-worth is based in their belief that they are intelligent, and you can manipulate HN folks just as easily as any other population. That's why I refuse to play into that narrative: HN folks aren't more logical than any other group and I refuse to pretend they are.
I have plenty of criticism of the rationalist movement, but one thing I think they get right is that if you are unable to conceive of yourself as irrational, you'll never identify your irrationalities and fix them--if you can't admit you are irrational sometimes, you are doomed to remain as irrational as you are.
Only if/because they are reading too much into the concept of legal personhood. A thing being a person doesn't mean the thing is equivalent to a human or that it has every right that every human has. It generally just means that the law attributes certain rights and obligations to that thing because that is more convenient than finding the right human(s) to attribute them to in the circumstances.
The two types of persons do not have the same rights and obligations and they can not commit the same crimes.
But not to be conflated with rovers or wanderers!
It seems like there are judges in the US who are sympathetic to the argument that elephants are clearly persons with consciousness, desires, suffering, etc. but that the ramifications of declaring them as such would be too chaotic.
One day.
[0]: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2022/03/10/what-we-owe-our-...
Really? Businesses and governments can be legal entities, and legal entities need not be people.
In case of Hindu deities, temples have properties, just like how the Crown has properties in England. A temple property is usually managed by a Trust, but the property is considered to belong to the deity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_person
When it's not a natural person (ie, a human being) it's called a juridical person:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juridical_person
"Person" is in this usage a piece of legal jargon.
There is no usage of "Person" here. It says "People". The plural of "legal person" is "legal persons", so clearly nobody is talking about that.
> It’s widely known that Corporations are People. This is universally agreed to be a good thing; I list Target as my emergency contact and I hope it will one day be the best man at my wedding.
It reminds me of that episode of Community where Subway enrolled a person who they hired to legally represent their corporate entity so that they could open a shop on campus without violating the school's rule that only student-run businesses were allowed.
The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals. A nice treatise on laws under which various animals have been tried in court.
> the legal rights of the divine most often come up when land is contested between different faiths and sects (Hindus and Muslims, the Maori and Industry).
> 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.
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.
Does that mean I can sue it for flooding my property?
Anyway, I'd be surprised if AI didn't gain some kind of legal status with some kind of limited personhood, if corporations and ships can be.
Something like this...
> The "no cure, no pay" principle is a fundamental concept in medical law where a doctor (the party assisting a human in health danger) is only entitled to a reward if the healing operation is successful in saving the person or part of person (life, limb, sight, hearing, etc.). If the operation fails, the doctor receives no payment, regardless of the effort or expense incurred.
This leads to fun-sounding case names, like "United States v. 422 Casks of Wine" and "United States v. One Solid Gold Object in the Form of a Rooster".
IANASL (i am not a shipping lawyer)
viciousvoxel•2h ago