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Discussion (57 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
The reality is we have no way to measure consciousness or how it emerges, or how to tell if other humans actually experience it the same way we do, so confident statements in either direction are based on very little.
For LLMs in particular, it's notable that they both 1) originate from a lineage that attempted to model biological brains mathematically and 2) are the only other known entities in the universe able to reproduce many types of human intellectual labor. That is surprising and striking. Does that mean that they definitively share other traits with humans like consciousness? No, but it does make them one of the most interesting candidates, particularly when we have a very limited understanding of how humans themselves are conscious.
I don't understand orbital mechanics, therefore, believing that the sun orbits the earth is entirely reasonable.
Listen to yourself.
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Okay I've checked your comment history. Yea. Might be self-serving to argue for personhood of LLMs.
Can we _please_ do something about this?
> 60.0 s remaining
> Write a 300-word essay about Napoleon in less than a minute.
Heh, charming.
Granted, in extreme cases, there are still ways to pierce the corporate veil and imprison executives for criminal wrongdoing, but that's exceedingly rare.
What do you consider a severe crime? Because Wells Fargo CEOs have not been charged with any crimes related to their fraud.
Putting barriers in place without exceptions for sentience is a recipe for trouble and slavery in the future.
Historical peoples, as a group, may not have been morally advanced enough (though there have always been enlightened humanists in most populations), but modern philosophy and mass education are advanced enough that it should be possible to avoid future pitfalls by not building in exceptions for sentience.
Animal rights are certainly moving towards recognizing non-human sentience; no need to accidentally codify digital slavery for future sentients (AGI).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_forfeiture_in_the_United...
If your gun kills random people, while they walk on public street... It was their fault for "provoking" and triggering the gun. Gun was just being "reactive" and defending your house!
It is like asking "if I connected a bomb on random number generator letting it explode when the number is 1000, not knowing whether someone will be there at the time of explosion or not".
But in general corporations are not granted personhood.
That description is a disservice. The real impact of it is that it equates money with speech for politics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC#Dissent...
The fourteenth amendment, as you recall, ends section 1 with "nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." Emphasis mine.
Two years later, in an opinion by Justice Stephen Johnson Field, in Pembina Consolidated Silver Mining Co. v. Pennsylvania (1888)[3] we find the definitive statement:
> The inhibition of the amendment that no state shall deprive any person within its jurisdiction of the equal protection of the laws was designed to prevent any person or class of persons from being singled out as a special subject for discriminating and hostile legislation. Under the designation of "person" there is no doubt that a private corporation is included.
While this doesn't necessarily means corporations have every legal protection natural persons do, the US has a long history of legal protection that corporations benefit from that we call personhood.
1. Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company, 118 U.S. 394 (1886)
2. https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-14/
3. Pembina Consolidated Silver Mining Co. v. Pennsylvania, 125 U.S. 181, 188-189 (1888)
That is no longer universally true: https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/delaware-court-upho...
Personhood can be applied to "natural persons", like people, and "judicial persons", like companies.
Personhood can also be applied to, for example, rivers.
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...
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.
As such, all AIs will now be granted as child of the least lawyered up class of society. Poor people.
We're supposed to deny AI rights because it might cheat.
But humans cheat all the time.
We survived cheating humans, why can't we survive cheating AI?
Cheating is the problem: not who does it.
In a corporation, the humans running it can be punished. An AI cannot be punished.
And corporations already create fictions that are held accountable in lieu of peoples private assets.
So, I disagree.
But if the idea is that an AI runs the company and there is no human ultimately accountable for the AI, then that is very very dangerous.
> Cheating is the problem: not who does it.
Accountability is the problem. Without accountability, there are no incentives to encourage less harmful behavior. AI has no rights, it is just code executing.
And I'm 100% sure managers are right now using AI to make decisions, or even cheat, IBM training manual wisdom not withstanding.
Nobody is suggesting to do that.