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Comment by metada5e | Hacker News Reader

I recommend reading the book 'For Profit' for deeper knowledge on this topic - the book covers the origin of corporations and the ideas lying behind legal personhood. It sounds like a dry read but it is surprisingly well written and as much about history as about law. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/60568507-for-profit

Criminal and Civil liability are the two topics to focus on - you will find that non-human entities have very limited categories of crimes that apply to them. This is a key topic in the emergence of 'seemingly conscious' or 'seemingly unitary' AGI compute entities.

Also worth noting that Common Law tends to be the primary mode of law globally, even in counties that are nominally Code Napoleon (aka Civil Law) countries.

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Amusingly enough, corporate personhood is one relatively straightforward pathway for a capable AGI to attain legal personhood.

No novel legislation required. Just some legal grey areas and a whole lot of scheming.

In the US, a corporation needs a business bank account, and that account must be registered to one or more corporate officers with legal identification.

Does it count if the officer is in cryosleep?

A bench warrant is indefinite so they will be brought to court immediately after core temperature and circulation is restored. It will be posted to the cylinder like a parking ticket.

IANAL, not in any of the parallel universes either!

You absolutely do not need a bank account for an LLC. It makes accounting easier, but it's not a requirement.

Can confirm, having started multiple LLCs and S-Corps.

You get the corporate entity first, and this is required to get the bank account.

So, if the bank account was required to get the corporate entity formed, none would ever be formed, as the bank acct and the corporate authorization would forever be waiting for the other prerequisite to be complete.

And no, AFAICT, there is no hard requirement for a bank account to maintain a corporation, although in practice it would make doing almost everything quite inconvenient.

In Czechia, you need a specific sort of account to start a LLC, an account that is only used to contain the initial capital.

The bank will issue a confirmation to the notary that the money is present in that account, the notary will sign the founding papers, and the account is then liquidated again. You can take the money out, or move it to [different] regular account, or have none and operate in cash, as long as your transactions don't exceed a certain limit.

The exception is when you become a VAT payer. In that moment, you have to have at least one bank account. IIRC VAT registration is only required if your yearly revenue exceeds approx. 70 thousand dollars.

Sure, you need humans for a corporate structure to exist. But nothing prevents meat proxies from occupying the vital positions.

Find a few sufficiently loyal humans, have them bring the corporate structure up. Arrange for good wages and proper incentives, set up checks and balances so that the system can tolerate and recover from meatbag failures. Make the corporation fully reliant on the AGI for normal functioning, so that any attempt to take it over leaves you with an empty shell and an unpleasant pile of legal exposure.

Like I said: a lot of scheming is required. But none of it is strictly illegal.

That’s basically just the benefits of limited liability, that has nothing to do with AI personhood. And you’re basically just describing the formation of a legal entity, the reference to AGI could just as easily be replaced with “talented founder” or “dual class shares” or “poison pill” or something.

In any event, the law tends to be responsive about establishing doctrines for extending liability to individuals involved, like piercing the corporate veil, principles of partnership, or a statutory regime (like CERCLA).

OTOH if a fairy tale about AI is what it takes to get lawmakers to abandon (or at least reform) the corporate form, then let's tell the fairy tale.

Sure, it's just a legal entity. One that just so happens to give a clever machine a foothold in the human legal system.

Frankly, I just find the idea amusing.

Good for the AI (though who are its stockholders or the members of its board of directors?), but not so great, perhaps, for all the individuals who enabled it, who might now all be deemed to be partners in a general partnership with the AI and therefore jointly liable for the acts and liabilities of all the other partners.

A sufficiently long circle of corporations would be difficult to follow. Corporations can in some jurisdictions be secretary or indeed directors.

Not even a gray area if the AGI settles for controlling the board of directors. With the right incentives, anything is possible. Just look at Musk! And he's even got a built in expiry date.

What if it tries to DoS the Delaware corporate registry via a rapidly-evolving network of shell corporations?

(Ref: http://www.accelerando.org/fiction/accelerando/accelerando.h...)

This has been discussed quite a bit in various contexts. At least in the US these structures always resolve to a Natural Person as far as the law is concerned. Everything else is just obfuscation and indirection.

> Common Law tends to be the primary mode of law globally

That's not even close to be true, except for former and present English colonies. Most of the world follows civil law that itself follows Roman law.

>Also worth noting that Common Law tends to be the primary mode of law globally, even in counties that are nominally Code Napoleon (aka Civil Law) countries.

Why do you say this?

Global companies tend to use Common Law for international business. I've been operating in one of them and often reviewing contracts. When forming international agreements, businesses frequently opt for a common law system due to its perceived adaptability and flexibility in dealing with evolving commercial environments.

Looks interesting, thank you!

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