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".
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.
You can be pretty sure there's a human down there somewhere, but it can be very difficult to actually find a name.
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.
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.
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.
If the judge thinks the "AI" is not a person, it cannot be emancipated by some trick with an LLC.
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.
>>>> 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.
It's the weak legal point here in the entire idea.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).