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Comment by cstross | Hacker News Reader

Point of note: that model is now explicitly illegal in UK company law -- any directorship must be occupied by a human being: if you interpose shells in the way, they're collapsed until a human being is identified as the responsible party.

(Let me also add that I approve of this. My opinions have shifted in the past 10-15 years and I now think that permitting autonomous corporations to exist -- or even continuing the doctrine of corporate personhood -- are a terrible idea for humanity (because they're effectively AIs that compete with us, and not in a good way).)

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> any directorship must be occupied by a human being: if you interpose shells in the way, they're collapsed until a human being is identified as the responsible party.

But what if there really is no human ultimately responsible?

I' thinking, here, of a goal-driven agent that self-replicates by forming corporations, having those corporations purchase machine time on cloud hosting services, and then running algorithms (e.g. Bitcoin mining, e-commerce) which are more profitable on those hosts than the cost of said cloud resources.

The first such entity might be "blamed" on the person who wrote it—but what if its codebase includes code to detect beneficial open-source patches to itself (on Github et al), and spawn its descendants with those patches in place? Eventually there could be a whole ecosystem of these things doing different things, coded effectively "by the world" but running for nobody's benefit in particular but their own. They'd be "AIs that compete with us" in the literal sense. (And if you think about what a real autonomous AI agent would have to do to survive fault-tolerantly on the Internet, it'd probably look very similar; this is sort of a porto-AI-rights thing.)

As the history of fraud-detecting "algos" has proven, such pseudo-organisms would quickly be compromised by earth's apex predator: creative human attackers.

Thank you for posting. I've gone through a similar transition after reading the thought-provoking Accelerando. It will be cheaper for society to experience this provocation and immune response via Accelerando, rather than Ethereum et al.

On the other hand, a wide variety of layers-of-indirection exist in corporate finance and are widely wielded against the rest of society, sometimes aided by millisecond-level decision making such as HFT.

Until such unfair advantages are illegal, would it be better if more people had understanding and access to them, without gatekeeping lawyers? Many comments here are excusably about goose and gander, i.e. reciprocal proliferation.

What about an aggregation company to whom artists can give a global, non-exclusive, irrevocable license that only gets licenses to songs and albums if and when the artists want?

This company would not be owned by the artists but rather by a benevolent third party that promises to do no evil (no sarcasm intended).

I am still not sure how the revenue will flow back to the artists as they do not own this new totally legitimate facilitating entity though. Ideally, we'd want to retain as little money as possible and send as much as possible back to the artists. My motivation is to let artists be in the driving seat as much as possible which means they reap as much of the profit as possible and also bear as much of the risk of their investment as well.

Ideas?

I have no expertise to comment on the contractual merits of this general approach.

On the specific issue of payments: if there was a way to perform real-time "splitting" of bulk payments from distributors to the "broker", they could subtract their small fee and pay the artists at the same time.

Somewhat like PayPal Adaptive Payments, but with a potentially very large number of recipients per transaction. This way, none of the artists' funds are ever held by the broker, even for a short time.

There are lot of details here around varying fee percentages for different services, and ensuring that information does not leak between distributor, broker and payment gateway.

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