ZH version is available. Content is displayed in original English for accuracy.
Advertisement
Advertisement
⚡ Community Insights
Discussion Sentiment
29% Positive
Analyzed from 2613 words in the discussion.
Trending Topics
#personhood#corporations#humans#legal#human#rights#corporation#person#should#persons
Discussion (85 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 about consciousness being unable to emerge from simple weighted functions is baseless projection, wishing ourselves more special than an emergent property of the bag of weighted functions in our heads.
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.
__
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?
Suppose I have a local LLM running on my PC. I have close and personal conversations with it. It keeps a chat history. I'm later accused, falsely,* of a crime. During the process of defending myself, should the prosecutor be entitled to a copy of my LLM's conversation history that was seized pursuant to a warrant? Or allowed to interrogate my LLM, again seized while executing a search warrant?
Under current US law, the answers are probably yes. Just as an accused's diary or notebook can be seized and introduced into evidence, an LLM's internal state seems like a paper/effect/document that would be subject to search and seizure. But a conversation with a local LLM also seems more like a conversation with a spouse, therapist, or attorney. There are good public-policy reasons to treat those conversations as privileged; we want people to be able to get good advice without fear of disclosure. Shouldn't those reasons apply to LLM conversations as well?
I'm not saying LLMs should have personal rights. But I can see a case for privileges for real humans arising from conversations between real humans and LLMs. LLMs might not be human, but humans do interact with them as if they were.
*It doesn't matter, of course, whether the accusation is false. Due process means people have certain rights regardless of culpability. But I don't want readers to fixate on culpability, so in this scenario the accusation is unfounded -- let's say someone did break into a house and steal the family jewels, but a security camera identified the wrong person.
> 60.0 s remaining
> Write a 300-word essay about Napoleon in less than a minute.
Heh, charming.
This way legal consequences always have personal consequences and people should act accordingly
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.
No point even considering it if it can't run for extended periods. And actually keeping learning during the duration. As surely person should stay alive for decades if allowed.
An AI agent would need some kind of stable personality of it's own. Some sense of self outside whatever the hell people task it with for this to be meaningful. Data from Star Trek is a good fictional benchmark for that. Or Voyager's Holographic doctor.
I agree on the stability though. My point is that for personhood to start to make any sense it needs to operate that personhood continuously as well ending it would be ending a personhood. Which could be a murder...
There's a ton of scenarios where you can setup an AI to take on the personality of whoever, maybe other living people like someone famous. Granting the legal rights of personhood is going to be extremely problematic.
Is AI Jon Snow legally allowed to exist since George RR Martin has not given permission for anyone else to finish his books?
Will we have to abort our long-running agent persons before they reach the legal period for personhood?
FYI: It's an "old" article
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".
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).
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.