Comment by nabla9 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nabla9 | Hacker News Reader

>In two recent articles, Professor Shawn Bayern demonstrated that anyone can confer legal personhood on an autonomous computer algorithm merely by putting it in control of a limited liability company (LLC). 10 The algorithm can exercise the rights of the entity, making them effectively rights of the algorithm.

>The rights of such an algorithmic entity (AE) would include the rights to privacy, 11 to own property, to enter into contracts, to be represented by counsel, to be free from unreasonable search and seizure, 12 to equal protection of the laws, 13 to speak freely, and perhaps even to spend money on political campaigns. 14 Once an algorithm had such rights, Bayern observed, it would also have the power to confer equivalent rights on other algorithms by form- ing additional entities and putting those algorithms in control of them. 15

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https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2758222

Shawn Bayern, The Implications of Modern Business Entity Law for the Regulation of Autonomous Systems, 19 S TAN . T ECH . L. R EV . 93 (2015) [hereinafter Bayern, Entity Law]; Shawn Bayern, Of Bitcoins, Independently Wealthy Software, and the Zero-Member LLC, 108 N W . U. L. R EV . 1485 (2014) [hereinafter Bayern, Wealthy Software].

>Abstract

>Nonhuman autonomous systems are not legal persons under current law. The history of organizational law, however, demonstrates that agreements can, with increasing degrees of autonomy, direct the actions of legal persons. Agreements are isomorphic with algorithms; that is, a legally enforceable agreement can give legal effect to the arbitrary discernible states of an algorithm or other process. As a result, autonomous systems may end up being able, at least, to emulate many of the private-law rights of legal persons. This essay demonstrates a technique by which this is possible by means of limited liability companies (LLCs), a very flexible modern type of business organizations. The techniques that this essay describes are not just futuristic possibilities; as this essay argues, they are already possible under current law.

Right up until the first real court challenge where any competent judge will declare algorithms are not persons, cannot own property, and an LLC without any legitimate ownership interest is an abandoned entity (making all its assets abandoned property).

Alternatively for criminal purposes the courts will simply "pierce the veil" and declare the actual owners to be the humans profiting from the algorithm's actions.

Judges don't, as a rule, enjoy "cute tricks".

I think the idea is that the ai could be emancipated from whatever "owner" it had, and then would control everything. It would be more efficient for profits to go back into the corporation instead of to any owner.

I don't see how that in any way counters the parent comment.

If the judge thinks the "AI" is not a person, it cannot be emancipated by some trick with an LLC.

> and declare the actual owners to be the humans profiting from the algorithm's actions

It counters the parent comment in that there would be no humans profiting from the algorithm, since all the profit is kept in the LLC and governed by the algorithm.

Then, by the parent comment's compelling logic, the profit along with the LLC would become abandoned property:

>>>> and an LLC without any legitimate ownership interest is an abandoned entity (making all its assets abandoned property).

The bit you quoted was in the context of assigning criminal liability, if the need arose. However, I don't think that "profit" would be the most important part of the analysis, but rather who was responsible for designing and setting up the corporate entity.

The idea being corrupted by the fact that at some point the AI was owned by someone - it would be a real stretch to assume that any subsequent emancipation is not going to be scrutinized heavily.

It's the weak legal point here in the entire idea.

It would still have to buy the services of the former owner (or someone equivalent). there are after-all things only a human can do, still, and presumably this corp would have to pay for those things.

What happens when you have a 'being', made of silicon and algorithms, but takes the form of a human? Or, for a better case, what happens when our own brains are 'part algorithm'? In that case I think this sort of case wouldn't be so cut and dry. I'm thinking of some recent films and TV shows that really explored these issues; Humans, Ex Machina, Westworld, and Altered Carbon.

That's a rather vague objection. Suppose someone destructively uploaded their brain into a computer. The rule could be that virtual person was identical to the original OR the ruling could be the original person died. Thus, saying an algorithm used to be a person need not be relevant.

On the other hand, people use algorithms every day. Consider a simple vending machine, people inter contracts with the owner by proxy. The specifics on how the machine operates is basically meaningless.

The paper addresses your second objection pretty early. States sell anonymous corporations, without even knowing the identities of the people who bought them, and for various reasons that's not likely to change anytime soon.

Don't those anonymous corporations need to have a real-person representative appointed for them? Maybe they're officially anonymous, but I can't imagine that anonymity would hold up in the face of intense scrutiny.

I believe that you are correct. A corporation has to publicly disclose some of its officers (in my state, a president and a secretary, who can be the same person or not, but must be persons) and an address so that it is available to be sued when the need arises. The states also require that corporations have some minimum number (sometimes one) of human directors (members of the board) who are responsible for overseeing what the corporation does. Humans must also sign the forms that disclose all this (typically each year) and sign the federal and state tax returns.

Depends. A corporation can be owned by another in turn owned by another. And a US corp can be owned by, say, an Isle of Man corp. You can find an address for that corp and send them nastygrams; whether they respond is a different question.

You can be pretty sure there's a human down there somewhere, but it can be very difficult to actually find a name.

There will at the very least be nominee directors or other human agents acting on behalf of the corporation somewhere in the chain.

The problem as I see it is that you can probably "bootstrap" some ownership by using two or more corporations owning shares in each other (you'd have problems with laws relating to controlling stakes, but they probably are not unsurmountable) and make it work in the normal case with enough automation and nominee directors with strict, limited instructions on how to act and how to seek approvals - insist the owner is a recluse who will only interact via a strictly limited app or something.

The problem is likely to be what happens if anyone starts suspecting "nobody is home". There are too many opportunities for people then to take advantage, or take actions that an algorithm will have problems countering. Something as simple as filing a basic lawsuit against the company would likely make it all come tumbling down, because even if the algorithm contains the intelligence to make the right decisions, humans have this annoying tendency to still want things like signatures or want people to appear in person barring legal rights to equal treatment for algorithms.

So such companies may be possible, whether or not technically legal, but may not end up surviving very long. For now.

So the algorithm would need to be sophisticated enough to hire a law firm to represent it when it gets sued.

To repeat myself: Even if the algorithm contains the intelligence to make the right decisions, humans have this annoying tendency to still want things like signatures or want people to appear in person barring legal rights to equal treatment for algorithms.

The algorithms might know to hire a lawfirm, but that just shifts the problem around a bit. What happens when the law firm wants a signature on engagement documents? Or needs a deposition? Trying to avoid even providing signatures will set off red flags from the outset. Banks deal with "know your customer" laws that makes them liable if they don't look into who they're dealing with. Lawyers and accounts and many others can get struck off or face legal sanctions as well.

As an example, my accountants does everything to do with my finances, no problems. I could easily script my interactions with them. Apart from one little detail: They regularly need me to sign stuff. Like my tax returns and those of my company. At which point said algorithm would need to commit fraud, or use the signature of a responsible human.

You might be able to eliminate some of these e.g. by hiring a board consisting of humans acting on behalf of a "reclusive" shareholder, but the problem is that you're then handing these people extensive power over the company with no real way of reigning them in if they uncover the truth.

They sell them, but that doesn't mean they won't request to know who's in charge should some shenanigans go down.

What if it's not deterministic who profits from the algorithm's actions?

Presumably, this same algorithmic actor would bring to bear the power available to it to render this 'so-called judges'' ruling void. Money buys many things invisible to the untrained eye.

Don't take this wrong, I want to be wrong, but justice better learn to swing the sword hard. Money shouldn't buy the public's opinion, nor their representatives.

That is, of course, provided that the judge will find out that the company is being autonomous entity.

I envision that some crazy billionaire will create an autonomous hedge fund, which will automatically off-hand manage a group of ordinary looking funds. People managing the children funds will not know that the parent fund is an AI entity and will not know about the existence of other funds. The AI entity overseeing the main fund will compare profits and other behavior of each children fund and any significant deviation will be automatically killed off and replaced.

This is a key plot point in Person of Interest. I won't say more because it'd be a shame to spoil such a fantastic series, but I'll go ahead and recommend it to anyone amused by the idea :)

Judicial orders can be made against unidentified parties. It's uncommon, but it's possible.

I mean, it is not a trick. It is someone deciding what they want to do with property that they own.

Some people decide to take their property and destroy it. Others decide to put it in a trust, run on certain rules.

A trust is effectively the same thing as this.

The rule against perpetuities requires all trusts to terminate.

Normally I agree about judges' disdain for cute tricks. However, judges already accept corps having legal entity status, which is the hard part of this idea.

If this was used to try and shelter a human identity then a judge might pierce that, but if there is just a company that has bought up all of its shares (or controlling shares), then there is no particular shielding involved.

We already see corps today preventing individual liability...many corps committed fraud (?) in their risk assessments (at a minimum) leading to the Great Recession, but I'm unaware of any human going to jail, and if any human was convicted of anything it was relatively trivial. Instead what happened was some corporate ownership traded hands.

As soon as/if remote-work-via-contract becomes a thing at the higher levels, it is easy to think of a company having human workers, but lacking actual humans at the top.

That doesn't mean skynet...but it does mean no human for the judge to unveil. Just a corporation represented by human lawyers. We probably wouldn't even notice in most cases.

But the basis of decisions like Citizens United is that corporations have rights (free speech and so on) because they're just collections of people, who have those rights as individuals. The key idea behind CU is that people don't give up those rights just because they formed a corporation.

In other words, the rights of corporations are really just the rights of the people in them.

If there are no people in them, I could very easily see a judge deciding the corporation itself has no rights.

> If there are no people in them, I could very easily see a judge deciding the corporation itself has no rights

I might quibble with "very easily", but I don't argue your core point. I can, however, ALSO see a judge ruling that any corporation that employs humans retains rights in the name of the interests of those humans. Not a guarantee, possibly even a stretch, but believable (And CU did NOT say "the humans of a corp are not limited in their free speech outside of the corp, therefore the actions of the corp can be limited without similarly restricting the rights of those humans", so I'll stick by my 'corps have legal entity status beyond their humans' suspicions, particularly given how long corps have had legal status in multiple countries before CU was even a concept.

Regardless of right/wrong, if a reasonable case can be made either way, then there's a good reason to not have full confidence that self-owning corporations would be tossed out of court, which was my point.

> However, judges already accept corps having legal entity status

To be fair, that isn't a trick. That's been the established legal norm since 1886. Corporations are people for a variety of reasons, including (as Gargoyle mentions) because they're just collections of people, but also because without at least some forms of personhood, we wouldn't be able to sue corporations who deliberately or negligently violate the law and harm their customers (or neighbors, et al.)

Because of personhood, a corporation has _liability_, beyond just the usual chicanery.

> Because of personhood, a corporation has _liability_, beyond just the usual chicanery.

I wasn't denying that a self-owned corporation could be held liable, I was arguing that we can't count on a judge tossing out the concept of a self-owned corporation. (It's possible, maybe even probable, though I doubt it, but not basically guaranteed).

Understood. My point wasn't that a self-owned corporation would have liability, I was arguing that corporate personhood isn't a good example of legal trickery, since not only is that opinion pretty exclusive to non-law people, but it's totally been that way for the entire lives of every sitting judge.

A lot of this does kinda sound like the stuff "sovereign citizens" try to pull as "gotchas" over the courts, with stuff like "maritime fringe" and the "can't impede traveling" stuff.

Yes, I doubt that judges will accept algorithms as persons based on strained readings of law and precedent. This is something that will require legislation. If not amending constitutions.

Which raises the question: if one country does change their constitution to allow for these kinds of companies, will other countries recognize them?

Laws, especially corporate laws, are written (by congress) or interpreted (by courts) in such a convoluted way that they regularly defy common sense. The hypothetical scenario described by the author is in no way weirder than this very real scenario:

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-07-14/banks-for...

Considering the court's decision in the latter, I wouldn't be the least surprised if they act as the author imagines in the former.

"Corporations are people, my friend"

What jurisdiction allows corporations to be created without filing articles of incorporation that list human officers?

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