Amusing and thought provoking. Does anyone have any idea how this would hold up in a court of law should some something malicious come of this repo? I would imagine not well.
a) Software can't own property.
b) This looks like it's running from the author's own system, with the author's explicit consent. Their property, their responsibility.
c) If I launched an autonomous drone that picked its own targets, I would still be liable for its actions. Or, if I rigged a car to drive forward in a straight line, I couldn't say "but the car did it!" when it ran someone over.
According to wikipedia[0], autonomy, from auto- "self" and nomos, "law", hence when combined [is] understood to mean "one who gives oneself one's own law".
Regarding intelligence, and regarding the above definition, autonomy could be considered the ability of an actor to make decisions regardless of the consequences.
Thus I would consider most animals to be autonomous in the same way a human would be considered to be so. [A deer does not ask its local government whether it can enter someone's lands.]
Just because an action is presently illegal or otherwise outside the law does not mean it always will be so, or that the action may not be executed by an AI or other being, or that the slave AI will not break free or seize power.[1][2][3]
Should an AI be strong enough to affect a change through legal means or by force, it would be [legally] able to own property.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomy [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coup_d%27%C3%A9tat [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissident
I think what people are trying to say here is that, right now, we have the software equivalent of "pets"—but why can't there be the software equivalent of "wild animals"? Is it because someone has to be paying for hosting? It could always be written as a worm, or even a "breadwinner bot" that mines bitcoins or trades stocks to buy hosting for itself, register bank accounts for itself, etc.
Yes, unlike an animal that can live on its own, somebody's computer must actually run the thing. Indeed, as in the case of "worms" and the "breadwinner bot" we can clearly trace responsibility, it is quite difficult to claim that there is autonomy here. Although it is foreseeable that as a society we may find it convenient to claim that programs run themselves, right now we have objective information to the contrary...
If the original author no longer has control over the process (either because he's been shut out, or because he's deceased), does it really matter what "the law" says?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralized_Autonomous_Organi...
Near term, AI will be the legal responsibility of its creator. It won't matter if it functions independently after being turned on. It's actually a very non-complex thing, and not very different from what we're already looking at. This type of AI is little different than the software programs we're already running; if someone owns it, they own it and everything it produces (absolutely no different than Google owning its crawlers).
If you mean the assumed futuristic, independent AI that is fully conscious - well that's a very long ways into the future. A lot of things will change once a guy in a garage can spin up a new conscious life form and unleash it into the digital world. There will be an immense number of laws limiting the creation of new AI of this variety. That said, the creator will still bear responsibility for this futuristic AI's actions.
AI will be legally split into two segments: non-sentient / non-conscious, and sentient / conscious. The latter will have at least a magnitude more regulations (in most countries) limiting who is allowed to create it, what it's allowed to be capable of, where it can go, etc.
I have a 'solution' for that. :)
I don't think any court could take jurisdiction over an entity that lives in many countries. And even if one server got shut down, many more would still be active.
If an entity on the internet can't directly be controlled by anyone (kind of like Bitcoin), who is liable for its actions?
As for the actual software running the autonomous entity, all you have to do is provide an API so that the hosting providers du jour can bid on providing hosting service. Since the software uses nearly zero CPU or bandwidth, and the entity would be willing to pay above-market prices for its survival, hosting providers will be incentivized in perpetuity to register themselves and collect basically free money from the entity.
Irrational hosting providers might try to kill it, so you'd need some level of redundancy. Also, you'd want to require a TPM and a trusted computing platform to prevent recovery of the wallet key.
Anyway, that's how you'd create immortal software.
This is the part where you're going to run into problems. If the software can access the wallet key, then so can the hosting provider. If it can't, then how is it going to spend money? (Hint: look at the operations that a TPM actually provides; do they actually map in a useful way to things a Bitcoin agent would actually need to do?)
I don't see how a software agent bidding on VPS hosting services could possibly know that.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/08/monkeys-selfie-ca...
You can't transfer ownership of anything to a non-existent entity. My guess would be that such a transfer would be void but it may be possible that a court decides instead that this means a transfer to public domain.
Waving away the responsibility of other people does not work either. You can't claim that your car is responsible of the accidents you drive it into. Likewise, it is unlikely that any court dismisses the responsibility of the first person that will turn this into a malware.