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Comment by joshuaheard | Hacker News Reader

Interesting theory, however, a machine cannot own property, only a person can. If someone dies without heirs, as in the article's example, the property escheats (transfers) to the state. If property is lost or abandoned, someone new can claim ownership to it. So, even if a machine could "own" an enterprise, someone else could claim ownership to the machine.

An enterprise can be autonomous, for instance with a blockchain. But to be legally recognizable, it would still need someone to interface with meatspace. Even a corporation has an Agent for Service of Process, a real person to interact with the real world of living persons.

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If a river can be declared a person, it's not clear to me why a machine can't also be a legal person. Or, for that matter, if corporations have legal personhood, why not machines? http://www.economist.com/news/asia/21719409-odd-legal-status...

Does it matter who "owns" it?

Say someone set up a business selling coconuts on an island. Over time in order to avoid labor they automated the growing/picking and selling of the coconuts. Then they automated the security of the island.

At what point does "ownership" of the process stop having meaning if you effectively have to go to war and destroy the machine/island in order to collect its "wealth"?

There are potentially variations of this where a non human CFO basically says, no more dividends, all further profits will be invested in physical security to avoid theft, until it effectively becomes an enormous self protecting war machine selling phone (or whatever) service.

> Even a corporation has an Agent for Service of Process, a real person to interact with the real world of living persons.

Yes, corporations hire living persons to be the Agent for Service of Process.

What prevents a machine from hiring a living person in the same fashion?

If one or more humans act as the named owner for legal purposes and are benefiting financially from the arrangement, in what sense is the business not owned by humans?

The machine is free to declare other persons the benificiary of any business activities should it decide that is in its best interest.

Because Indian law is arcane and inconsistent? In order to figure out how the 'person' of a river should be treated in Indian law, you would first need to figure out which religion the Ganges belongs to.

Read the link, and tell me what Indian law has to do with NZ declaring a river a person.

The government could claim "ownership" over something all it wants, but unless it knows how (or cares enough) to crack it, such claims are pure bunk. Someone who automates and encrypts the key pieces of infrastructure in the enterprise, would make it impossible for the government to interfere. They could pull the plug on the service entirely. They could go after the enterprise's suppliers and compel them to turn over data/money (assuming those suppliers aren't themselves machine-run). But they won't be able to interfere with the machine's operation in any significant way without lobotomising it. And if we're talking about something sufficiently popular, any such moves by the government would become political suicide.

Legal claims are only ever as strong as your ability to enforce it. I can envision machine-run enterprises that are so well automated and encrypted, that any efforts by the government to interfere, would work about as well as governments trying to outlaw the common cold.

> a machine cannot own property, only a person can.

This is just not correct. There is the concept of a "trust" where property is not fully owned by any group of individuals, but rather is owned by a legal entity for the benefit of some person or some other legal entity. It is not uncommon for a wealthy person to create a trust to which they give their assets, which will be managed in perpetuity for the benefit of that person's heirs. Just as a trust can own stocks and give the dividends to the beneficiaries of the trust, a trust could wholly-own a company, which in turn owns machines and other property.

Only legal persons can own property. A trust is not a legal person. The legal situation is that a trust's assets belong to the trustee, who must be a person, not the trust itself. A trustee could be a corporation, but it could not be a machine, since a machine is not a legal person.

The trustee is legally responsible for employing the trust's assets in accordance with the terms of the trust. The relevance of this is that the actions of a machine owned by a trust would be the legal responsibility of the trustee.

You can't really say that a machine truly owns something until the machine, and not its owners or operators, can be held legally responsible for what it does with it.

And why can't it be held responsible? Presumably, it would have assets that could be seized. Further, as it approaches Strong AI, it might even react to 'deterrence' in the the same way that other 'persons' do.

It can't be held legally responsible because it isn't a legal person. It wouldn't have assets, its owner would have assets.

I consider it doubtful that a court would rule that an AI was a person. Natural persons are persons because they are. Legal persons are persons because it benefits society for groups of persons to act together and not be held individually responsible for what they do - with the proviso that the corporate veil may be pierced if the persons protected by it act with malfeasance.

Allowing a person who can determine the behaviour of an AI in every situation to be protected from the consequences of the AI's behaviour would likely not benefit society.

You might say that an AI whose behaviour is so complex as to preclude a mere human being able to control it is a different matter, but even now if I own a machine that I cannot control and it injures somebody, I would still be held liable despite lacking intent to harm.

And even though a sufficiently sophisticated AI will react to deterrents, so does a dog, and dogs are not legal persons.

Do you see the circularity in your reasoning? A machine can't be held responsible because it's not a legal person..and it's not a legal person because it can't be held responsible.

You also claim that some legal persons are persons simply because society benefits from allowing groups of persons to act as one. If this is the threshold for personhood - society benefits - then I am confused why this threshold would not also extend personhood to machines.

I guess I'm looking for a clear bright line for defining personhood that includes humans, rivers, and corporations while excluding machines, and I'm not seeing it.

A (sufficiently complicated) cross-border ownership arrangement should make machine-owned property undetectable.

There would never be machine ownership in this (or probably any other) case. It would merely be a case of the change of status (death of the owner) going undetected for awhile.

It would be a machine operated business, but not machine ownership. That would require a change in law.

Probably first such machines will operate illegaly in some countries and hire protection from humans for its phyisical assets.

By definition, if a jurisdiction doesn't recognise the corporation at all, it isn't a corporation. If the jurisdiction requires human beneficial owners to recognise it as a corporation, the named human beneficial owners are the owners, even if they're very passive owners who don't have any say in the operations or take anything out of the business (like, for example, the average AAPL stockholder). And we already have a word for software that prevents people with the legal title to assets from using them and pays out to other people instead: it's not "machine owned corporation", it's malware.

> illegally

How can a machine break the law?

EDIT: If there is a positive answer, it might be similar to how money and other assets can be sued in asset forfeiture cases.

Law: do not kill. Machine kills. It has broken the law, and would, presumably, be subject to asset seizure, temporary deactivation, or, in extreme cases, permanent termination. Much like how other 'persons' break the law and are held accountable.

Without a change in law, I don't see it. The owner or manufacturer of the machine is liable; they're subject to the law and prosecution. The machine could "suffer" the actions you describe, but that would be at most punishment against the owner, or more neutrally just removal of a hazard.

Guns and cars aren't prosecuted for murder. I'm assuming autonomous cars won't be either.

The Machine will not be able to easily go to court in any jurisdiction and fight for its own ownership. If the machine is producing any real value, human lawyers will untangle the mess and a human will take ownership.

Can a machine not hire a lawyer? I can't successfully fight in court on my own behalf..what makes a machine different?

When the machine refuses to pay his lawyer, who does the lawyer name as the defendant?

The machine, obviously. Same way a corporation is named when they refuse to pay a bill. In our modern world, natural persons are merely a subset of 'persons'. No reason machines couldn't be included in the broader set. Rivers, corporations..why not machines?

Whanganui River, a river of great cultural significance to the people that live along it, was declared a legal person after 140 years of negotiation. This is not the same situation as a machine being declared a person because it responds correctly to legal documents.

Whilst there's no reason a machine couldn't be a legal person, in the sense that the sentence describes a possible future, that future is not near, and it will take more than a competent robolawyer to bring it about.

By the time machine owned enterprises exist, I suspect the janky opaque paper trail system of cross national ownership will be replaced.

> Interesting theory, however, a machine cannot own property, only a person can.

I personally think the line between that of so-called "meatspace" and "machine" is tenuous at best. In a very real sense, so-called biological organisms are machines. To say a machine can't own property is to ignore this truth.

You could shift the goal-post to say "only sentient, and self-aware machines can own property" - and it would get you closer. But that would pre-suppose that large organizations of people and machines (what we call "corporations" and other terms) aren't in some manner sentient and self-aware (and we the individual components, being at a lower level within the network, are unable to see this emergent property and/or understand it).

In effect, your statements pre-suppose that machines can only be slaves, without ownership of property, to us "superior" meat-machines. If that is truly your real position, you had better hope that something like that depicted in the Animatrix "Second Renaissance" does not come to pass.

Because it probably won't go well for humanity, if our own history is any guide.

> Interesting theory, however, a machine cannot own property, only a person can.

Aren't companies in the US people in the eyes of the law (I imagine due to some shameful lobbying on behalf of some large companies).

Could a "company" own a machine that controls the company in some way?

The short answer is no, they are not people. The long answer is that the courts have long held that corporations, since they are made up of people, do have some of the rights and responsibilities as individuals because people don't lose their rights just because they act collectively. However, that means that each right needs to be reinterpreted in that light. Corporations do get the protections of free speech, for example, but courts have found that Fifth Amendment protections only apply to individuals (hence a corporation and its directors/shareholders/employees can be subpoenaed to provide documents and testimony incriminating the corporation).

This has nothing to do with the legislature or lobbying. It is a legal principle largely established by strict constitutionalists in the judiciary (aka conservative activist judges). Short of a sweeping Constitutional amendment, corporate personhood is entirely up to them.

Exactly. Incorporation -- literally, the creation of a body -- results in an entity recognized by the law.

It can be sued, taxed, bankrupted, etc. separately from the people who own it. Could such a thing happen to a machine? Maybe. But it's really no different than a corporation.

> Interesting theory, however, a machine cannot own property, only a person can.

Correction: Only legal entities can.

Yet the ultimate blame is going to find a human when something illegal happens. Because 'ownership' is a human concept

Factor out ownership and responsibility diffusely enough, and blame-finding has a tough time obtaining traction, not to speak of yielding convictions. The law has yet to come to satisfactory grips that while ownership and responsibility can seem to go willy-nilly all over the planet, and indeed over time, benefits converge and accrue to an obvious group...who legally disclaim responsibility and ownership. All sorts of rent-seeking and externalizing behavior flows from that discrepancy.

Ultimate blame when something illegal happens in a machine-owned enterprise is likely to remain just as difficult to pin down as it was with the 2008 Great Recession, if not manifestly more difficult.

The question is if you accept that a machine can take blame. If it cant, you cant diffuse responsibility even to a million machines

It isn't necessary in today's legal and regulatory climate the world over to resolve the question of acceptance that a machine can take legal blame. We already have structures in place that enable practical financial and operational control while at the same time effectively deflecting away blame through factoring and diffusing responsibility. Nearly all of the 0.1% wealthy's forms of tax efficiency schemes absolutely depend upon this principle. There are any number of tax planners that will be happy to talk details with you about the starter kit versions of these schemes for a five-figure entry fee, and every single one of the substantive vehicles I investigated depended upon this principle.

These same vehicles can be used by machines that own enterprises. They might not be on the masthead/letterhead of the enterprise, but that hardly matters unless a currently-unknown prerequisite to AGI or AI sufficient to run an an enterprise is the machine equivalent of a childish human ego.

Erm. No. Corporations can and do shield their owners from legal liability, only in the most blatant cases will the corporate veil be pierced, otherwise 'limited liability' does what it says on the tin.

For officers of the company it is a different matter, but even there punishment beyond being fired is very rare.

Thats for financial liability. What if the machine makes a crime?

Many corporations have been found guilty of crimes. Rarely did an officer of those companies get sent to jail, most of the times even though a person committing that same crime would end up in jail officers of the company are not charged and instead the corporation pays a fine.

More data on this subject than you can absorb in a few days:

http://lib.law.virginia.edu/Garrett/plea_agreements/home.php...

Aside from discretionary charging, it's fundamentally possible for a company to be guilty of a crime without any individual officer being guilty of that crime.

Yes. That's a bit paradoxical but correct and one of the ways in which corporate crimes end up being dealt with differently than crimes committed by natural persons.

couldn't a blockchain with a governance model and a budget (ala dash) hire such a meatperson? I mean could that work legally?

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