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Comment by ruined | Hacker News Reader

we already have a mechanism to establish artificial persons, it is called incorporation.

A corporation always has a human owner, who can be punished if the corporation commits severe crimes. An embodied AI with legal personhood has no such means of making it behave, because it can make arbitrarily many hidden copies of itself, so it doesn't need to care if one copy is killed or jailed.

> if the corporation commits severe crimes.

What do you consider a severe crime? Because Wells Fargo CEOs have not been charged with any crimes related to their fraud.

I was under the impression that one of the key reasons for corporate personhood was explicitly to shield the owner from civil and criminal accountability.

Granted, in extreme cases, there are still ways to pierce the corporate veil and imprison executives for criminal wrongdoing, but that's exceedingly rare.

Chance would be a fine thing. The modern corporation is a vehicle for the distribution/evasion of criminal and often civil liability, let's not pretend otherwise.

A corporation can own another corporation. So if you set up a loop of corporations owning other corporations, and the loop spans multiple countries, you can end up with a corporation ultimately owning itself. I vaguely remember IKEA trying to get this structure.

Corporations were created specifically to dilute and diminish the liability of the owners. If those same owners can further reduce liability by passing on to AI agents, then they absolutely will.

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