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Comment by rozim | Hacker News Reader

I have wondered if robots can own assets for example if there's a robot that walks around picking up aluminum cans and then taking them to a recycling center and getting paid for them, can it deposit that money in a bank account and be said to be the owner of the assets.

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Robots are always owned by some human entity though, including their bank account. It could just be another legal "virtual person" like a corporation.

No need to speculate, how about crows trained to pick up cigarette butts?

It's probably up to the bank, and of course rather challenging for them to pay their income taxes as we all must ...

There's a minimum threshold, and I don't think crows would earn enough to end up paying it. But if they did… surely there's some mechanism for dealing with individuals who have the capacity to provide significant value to society (=¹ get paid a lot), but lack the capacity to do government paperwork.

¹: for the sake of argument, assume this

Can a crow become the mayor

Usually, that position is restricted to humans. Maybe there's a crow sufficiently competent at mayoral duties, but crows aren't great at abstract verbal communication via sentences; I doubt any crow would be good at the job. (Though if no crow is competent, why have laws restricting them from being eligible?)

> can it deposit that money in a bank account and be said to be the owner of the assets.

most definitely, yes. why wouldn't it be the owner?

This is a corporation with extra steps.

I think there's a difference between legal and practical ownership.

Cryptocurrency is basically designed for this.

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