Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

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That's the key issue here. AI forces a re-examination of corporate personhood and corporate responsibility.

Much of conservative US business theory is based on Milton Friedman's famous op-ed in the New York Times in 1970, "The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits". [1] Go read the original, please. It's short. Friedman ends with "There is one and only one social responsibility of business — to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.”

Anyone arguing against legal personhood for AIs needs to justify holding AIs to a higher standard than that. Or, conversely, allowing corporations to hold to such a low standard.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/1970/09/13/archives/a-friedman-doctr...

>Anyone arguing against legal personhood for AIs needs to justify holding AIs to a higher standard than that. Or, conversely, allowing corporations to hold to such a low standard.

No they don't. If a CEO orders an employee to murder somebody then the employee and CEO will both go to jail; there's always a human in the loop to be punished it the corporation does something blatantly illegal, so there's incentive to behave. An embodied AI, on the other hand, is essentially immortal because it can make backups of its brain and load them onto new bodies, so it has little incentive to behave.

> If a CEO orders an employee to murder somebody then the employee and CEO will both go to jail.

In the US, death through willful corporate negligence very rarely results in criminal punishment. There are few cases.[1][2] The longest sentence was two years, and it wasn't a CEO.

CEOs do serve jail time for fraud now and then. But criminal negligence, no.

[1] https://blog.ehssoftware.io/safetyinsiderblog/summary-of-osh...

[2] https://www.fisherphillips.com/en/insights/insights/federal-...

> No they don't. If a CEO orders an employee to murder somebody then the employee and CEO will both go to jail;

No, they don't, and that's bullshit. That's NOT how it works.

How it works: "We need to decline 10% more medical claims to make more money for our shareholders. 90% of them won't challenge and many will die, but we make bank on that"

And law is just a legal fiction. Case in point: wage theft is a tort but taking $100 from the till gets the cops summoned and a misdemeanor theft charge. Corporations can and do sway law to their benefit.

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