Out of the 1000s of instances of Joe running around, in the wild, a handful have gotten into situations where he has had points penalized against his license following existing state law. Joe exceeds his points limit and his license is suspended after 2 days.
... This could be interesting.
It's basically an AI collective, whose 'brain' scatters across data centers around the world.
That's a nice picture of free-form learning from inputs, but the reality could be quite more rigid.
I'd expect something more like gathering "black box" style information of the situation (the analogous of a stack trace or core dump), and having programmers trying to improve the algorithms, while also taking into account all the safety issues that could go wrong, than some "let's change my behavior because I was penalized" neural-net/ML way.
Not a lawyer and not a founder, but as I understand it, it goes something like:
- If I own a company and it is insolvent or incapable of fulfilling some contract, I am probably not in trouble, the company is. It might still depend on the specifics, though.
- If I own a company and it does something illegal without my knowledge or intent, such as say produce unsafe products, I might be in trouble, or I might not be, depending on how unsafe, why and whether I can be found have been negligent in allowing it. The company itself definitely is in trouble, though, since it has clearly violated the law.
- If I own a company and I willingly task it, or even allow it, to do something illegal, with full knowledge of the illegal actions in question, then I am probably in trouble too.
Operating through a company doesn't make me immune from the law, and neither should working through an algorithm. On the other hand, full personal liability for everything my company/algorithm does, when I am not in the loop at the point the decision happens, seems like the wrong standard as well.
So basically the algorithm can be found guilty of a crime. The company that created it can then be found guilty of selling a defective product (depending on whether there was any reasonable way of catching the defect). The owners can be then charged with negligence or something to that effect if the defect is something that standard industry practice or compliance with regulations should have caught, or if it was introduced deliberately.
If someone has a law background here, feel free to let me know if I am misunderstanding anything...
That might be technically true but in reality it quite often does. See nearly all bankers from 2K8 melt down for good examples of how money and power buy immunity in what is really an economically based caste system.
Do you really think if this was some garage start-up and not Google that they would have been granted anything but a swift kick in the ass out the office door of whatever bureaucrat handled this?
If the purpose is to account for freak events where the algo misbehaves for reasons that couldn't be foreseen, is that any different than a (non-autonomous) vehicle part failing despite being well-designed and maintained? This is not a new situation - an algorithm is just another car part. You don't need to give legal personality to the fuel injection pumps or the steering column in case it fails unexpectedly.
This issue is only confusing to the extent this isn't considered.
>an algorithm is just another car part
Exactly. And the designer is on the hook for negligence in the usual way - but not for malicious, tragic, and/or unforseeable circumstances that may lead to death or injury.
Finding the boundary between those will keep a lot of lawyers very busy. But I don't think we need to start assigning personhood and agency to a steering system just yet.
A corporation is a legal person, which makes it a lot easier to enter a contract with one, but that doesn't imply it has rights. You can own a corporation without it being slavery.
It's still an abstraction over something akin to mechanical failure, like how corporate personhood is an abstraction over a group of people. It doesn't mean the algorithm has rights, any more than a fuel injection pump does. You also can't murder a corporation, even though it's a legal person.
I'm pretty technically literate, but I have to admit I'm at a complete loss as to why this project matters (let alone what it does). Could you enlighten me?
Let me try.
The Ethereum vision encompasses three components: P2P messaging, a file distribution layer and Blockchains. I described them in more detail here: https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/3npsoz/ethereum_i... In practice, this is actually more complex, but should suffice as an introduction.
The Ethereum developers are mostly focused on the Blockchain component. On-chain accounts can be associated with program code and state, the environment specifies a turing complete virtual machine, called Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). Transactions can call these programs (also called "smart contracts") and contracts can call other contracts as well. To avoid infinite loops, every execution step in the EVM incurs a fee ("gas cost") that is collected by the miner of the new block that include the transaction. If a transaction does not supply enough gas (paid in Ether, the networks currency), the fees are collected anyway and all changes are undone. The validity of the program state is guaranteed with a consensus algorithm. It is replicated across all nodes. So if you want to censor the program, you have to attack the entire network. This makes them reasonably independent of human control and thus allows them to control arbitrary state, including the networks currency.
But how can the contract communicate with the rest of the world? It can only do so using transactions. For example, it could incentivise transactions that supply it with information, or could use other contracts to schedule micropayments to some service.
Contracts could also be used to reference content addressed data (have a look at ipfs.io, these are basically the other two components) and thereby act as a (domain) name system.
All in all, this decentralises storage, state and communication and is the most futuristic thing I know of. It took me weeks to understand how these components relate to each other, but it was worth it.
Apparently corporations can have religious beliefs in the US.
I have, at least, misgivings about the ultimate decision - and certainly disagree with the religious beliefs claimed by the owners of Hobby Lobby - but I think we should deal with the actual arguments.
(BTW, who's going to pay speed fines? They shouldn't happen but I'm sure they will)
Conversely, what if the corporate shareholders were primarily algorithmic traders?
Human decision makers -- either individuals acting on their own behalf or humans acting as decision-makers in a corporation -- may choose to use algorithms to make decisions, and may choose to give programs that concretely instantiate algorithms minute-to-minute control of their resources. That doesn't mean that the personhood -- of the individual or corporation -- transfers to the algorithm or the concrete instance.
> Conversely, what if the corporate shareholders were primarily algorithmic traders?
Algorithmic traders are legal persons -- either corporations or individuals -- using computer programs to make and execute trading decisions.
This simply seems to be (without the text of the letter, just several news reports) an interpretation of law which is a basis for NHTSA to subsequently rewrite vehicle safety equipment requirements to support fully autonomous vehicles at the federal level.
Because of the way legal definitions are context-specific, it doesn't necessarily mean anything to anynof the other laws regarding drivers, much less anything outside of that domain.
So if anything, wouldn't any sort of sufficiently global optimisation only veer the ai away from behaviours resembling road rage over time?
Most passenger cars are far more capable than average drivers can exploit, so there is quite a bit of room for cars to drive very aggressively from human's perspective, but completely 'safe' from machine's perspective.
"Tests indicate most efficient driving technique to include lots of honking, flashing high beams, and spraying winshield wiper fluid onto cars following too close on the highway."