Is this the beginning of algorithmic personhood, then?

Algorithmic personhood seems like a pretty good path forward for all the inevitable legal questions this will stir up. You could prosecute the individual instance of the algorithm when it breaks a law, and if that's successful charge its employer for something like negligent training or negligent hiring.

If the give legal personhood to the algorithm, then in a case of an accident you'd charge it. If you're charging the manufacturer anyway, you don't need to give the algorithm personhood, any more than for any other device.

The distinction still makes sense because it allows for graduation. If I drive too fast in a company car, I get the ticket and the company walks free, but if I crash because the company forced me to drive overnight for 10 hours straight, while I might still loose my license, the company is definitely on the hook for something.

How would that apply to self-driving cars, though?

well, the argument is, i think, in one situation the error resides on the individual, on the other the error resides in the organization. i don't think this would be really comparable to AI drivers unless each car differed significantly enough to establish them as actually separate. if i use the same equation 100 times, and its wrong every 1 time, it cant be called an accurate equation.

And the next step would be to allow algorithms to have bank accounts, earn money for their work and then be charged, prosecuted and put in "jail" for X number of CPU cycles.

What if its process is already chroot jailed?

Have a look at Ethereum. It already allows programs to control money. Soon, much more.

I've been to Etherium's website, I've looked over the wikipedia entry, but I still don't understand what it actually is. Best I can figure, it's a replacement for "the internet".

I'm pretty technically literate, but I have to admit I'm at a complete loss as to why this project matters (let alone what it does). Could you enlighten me?

I agree, the current website does not explain it very well.

Let me try.

The Ethereum vision encompasses three components: P2P messaging, a file distribution layer and Blockchains. I described them in more detail here: https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/3npsoz/ethereum_i... In practice, this is actually more complex, but should suffice as an introduction.

The Ethereum developers are mostly focused on the Blockchain component. On-chain accounts can be associated with program code and state, the environment specifies a turing complete virtual machine, called Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). Transactions can call these programs (also called "smart contracts") and contracts can call other contracts as well. To avoid infinite loops, every execution step in the EVM incurs a fee ("gas cost") that is collected by the miner of the new block that include the transaction. If a transaction does not supply enough gas (paid in Ether, the networks currency), the fees are collected anyway and all changes are undone. The validity of the program state is guaranteed with a consensus algorithm. It is replicated across all nodes. So if you want to censor the program, you have to attack the entire network. This makes them reasonably independent of human control and thus allows them to control arbitrary state, including the networks currency.

But how can the contract communicate with the rest of the world? It can only do so using transactions. For example, it could incentivise transactions that supply it with information, or could use other contracts to schedule micropayments to some service.

Contracts could also be used to reference content addressed data (have a look at ipfs.io, these are basically the other two components) and thereby act as a (domain) name system.

All in all, this decentralises storage, state and communication and is the most futuristic thing I know of. It took me weeks to understand how these components relate to each other, but it was worth it.

Thanks for the "for dummies" version! I think I might actually have an idea for an application that would benefit from this infrastructure. :)

Very interesting! commenting to come back later and read up

Isn't this how HFT works?

No, a human or group of humans is responsible for the HFT algorithm.

Are there not instances of parents being held legally responsible for their child's actions? I'm not setting you up. I don't know the answer to that question but if the answer is yes, that could be an analogy.

Yes, but my point is that the only reason to grant legal personality to a "thing" is if you want to shield its owner from liability. If you're still holding the manufacturer liable for infractions committed by the algorithm, you don't need it.

Ah, but aren't companies themselves entities such that their owners and creators are liable about their actions in certain cases, but not in others?

Not a lawyer and not a founder, but as I understand it, it goes something like:

- If I own a company and it is insolvent or incapable of fulfilling some contract, I am probably not in trouble, the company is. It might still depend on the specifics, though.

- If I own a company and it does something illegal without my knowledge or intent, such as say produce unsafe products, I might be in trouble, or I might not be, depending on how unsafe, why and whether I can be found have been negligent in allowing it. The company itself definitely is in trouble, though, since it has clearly violated the law.

- If I own a company and I willingly task it, or even allow it, to do something illegal, with full knowledge of the illegal actions in question, then I am probably in trouble too.

Operating through a company doesn't make me immune from the law, and neither should working through an algorithm. On the other hand, full personal liability for everything my company/algorithm does, when I am not in the loop at the point the decision happens, seems like the wrong standard as well.

So basically the algorithm can be found guilty of a crime. The company that created it can then be found guilty of selling a defective product (depending on whether there was any reasonable way of catching the defect). The owners can be then charged with negligence or something to that effect if the defect is something that standard industry practice or compliance with regulations should have caught, or if it was introduced deliberately.

If someone has a law background here, feel free to let me know if I am misunderstanding anything...

The thing is: what's the purpose of finding "the algorithm" guilty of a crime? A company owns assets that can be used to pay fines and damages, and as a semi-autonomous entity (in the sense that "it" still exists even if all of its owners and workers are replaced) it can be prohibited or forced to do something. An algorithm, on the other hand, owns nothing and its actions are wholly dependent on the people that program and configure it.

If the purpose is to account for freak events where the algo misbehaves for reasons that couldn't be foreseen, is that any different than a (non-autonomous) vehicle part failing despite being well-designed and maintained? This is not a new situation - an algorithm is just another car part. You don't need to give legal personality to the fuel injection pumps or the steering column in case it fails unexpectedly.

It's entertaining that apparently one of our signifiers of independent personhood is "Can drive a car."

This issue is only confusing to the extent this isn't considered.

>an algorithm is just another car part

Exactly. And the designer is on the hook for negligence in the usual way - but not for malicious, tragic, and/or unforseeable circumstances that may lead to death or injury.

Finding the boundary between those will keep a lot of lawyers very busy. But I don't think we need to start assigning personhood and agency to a steering system just yet.

With the comment that sparked off this thread, I wasn't implying the car had any sense of agency. Rather, that legal personhood might be a good way to sort out the laws.

A corporation is a legal person, which makes it a lot easier to enter a contract with one, but that doesn't imply it has rights. You can own a corporation without it being slavery.

The purpose I had in mind when I first mentioned the idea was just to provide a convenient way to reason about the law. It lets you re-use laws written with human drivers in mind, instead of having to individually recontextualize each as a type of mechanical failure. So you can charge the car with reckless driving, instead of having to show that an algorithmic failure lead to a behavior consistent with reckless driving.

It's still an abstraction over something akin to mechanical failure, like how corporate personhood is an abstraction over a group of people. It doesn't mean the algorithm has rights, any more than a fuel injection pump does. You also can't murder a corporation, even though it's a legal person.

"Operating through a company doesn't make me immune from the law, and neither should working through an algorithm."

That might be technically true but in reality it quite often does. See nearly all bankers from 2K8 melt down for good examples of how money and power buy immunity in what is really an economically based caste system.

Do you really think if this was some garage start-up and not Google that they would have been granted anything but a swift kick in the ass out the office door of whatever bureaucrat handled this?

Could it not also be used to constrain liability? If "Joe" has its license suspended, the manufacturer can slightly alter the algorithm and name it "Sue" and continue on.

I'm sure the car manufacturer would love that, but why would the legislative body - and society in general - create such a system?

Sounds reasonable to me.

Or perhaps every running instance would have to have a certain amount of insurance. You wouldn't be able to spin up arbitrary numbers of self driving cars, just like the average person needs to satisfy requirements before they can drive.

Judge and jury can then be algorithms, too!

Probably not. It's an interpretation that the word "driver" in one particular legal context does not necessarily mean a person, not a decision that computer programs are people.

This simply seems to be (without the text of the letter, just several news reports) an interpretation of law which is a basis for NHTSA to subsequently rewrite vehicle safety equipment requirements to support fully autonomous vehicles at the federal level.

Because of the way legal definitions are context-specific, it doesn't necessarily mean anything to anynof the other laws regarding drivers, much less anything outside of that domain.

Not in the traditional individual sense, I think. All AI drivers across the whole world will seamlessly exchange and synchronize with each other their learning experiences, resulting in self-driving vehicles that improve at an exponential rate.

It's basically an AI collective, whose 'brain' scatters across data centers around the world.

No way will the driving get exponentially better with the dataset size, probably closer to logarithmically actually, really fast in the beginning and progressively much much much slower

To be honest, I'd be worried about security vulnerabilities from a system that was exchanging and synchronizing data in the cloud. It seems unlikely that the first generation of self driving vehicles will be able to update its behavior in real time from other vehicles' experience. If there is any cloud connectivity at all, I'd expect it at first to be solely outgoing data that is sent to and aggregated by some central brain. Then, when the owner of a vehicle wants to update its AI, they manually download a certified patch or bundle of data that incorporates what the central brain has learned from all the cars. These upgrade patches would probably have to be constantly vouched for by debug vehicles that drive all over the streets of the world before being released.

>Not in the traditional individual sense, I think. All AI drivers across the whole world will seamlessly exchange and synchronize with each other their learning experiences, resulting in self-driving vehicles that improve at an exponential rate.

That's a nice picture of free-form learning from inputs, but the reality could be quite more rigid.

I'd expect something more like gathering "black box" style information of the situation (the analogous of a stack trace or core dump), and having programmers trying to improve the algorithms, while also taking into account all the safety issues that could go wrong, than some "let's change my behavior because I was penalized" neural-net/ML way.

It's already happening for google's driverless car program. I highly recommend the Ted talk about how driverless cars see the world. Fascinating.

Wouldn't left side driving in other countries screw the learning?

Algorithmic personhood already happened via corporations.

Corporations are legal persons, but they aren't algorithms (or even concrete programs), so they don't represent algorithmic personhood.

You could make the argument that their behavior is algorithmic, at least that's a part of what HFT banks on.

Conversely, what if the corporate shareholders were primarily algorithmic traders?

> You could make the argument that their behavior is algorithmic, at least that's a part of what HFT banks on.

Human decision makers -- either individuals acting on their own behalf or humans acting as decision-makers in a corporation -- may choose to use algorithms to make decisions, and may choose to give programs that concretely instantiate algorithms minute-to-minute control of their resources. That doesn't mean that the personhood -- of the individual or corporation -- transfers to the algorithm or the concrete instance.

> Conversely, what if the corporate shareholders were primarily algorithmic traders?

Algorithmic traders are legal persons -- either corporations or individuals -- using computer programs to make and execute trading decisions.

Corporations aren't persons, they're legal constructs. And no, a person is not a legal construct.

Within the USA, legally speaking, corporations are treated as people:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood

With some limits, I bet. Can you jail a corporation? In many cases law enforcement is based on the ability of the state to limit personal freedom, through the use of force if needed. I wonder who'll be responsible if a self driven car kills somebody. Obviously not the passenger, especially if Google gets this "no controls" policy passed. But Google and the other car makers won't sell any of those cars if some of their people has to spend jail time for any major accident that sooner or later will inevitably happen. A possibility is that it will be legislated to be similar to what happens when a bridge collapses and kills somebody. An investigation and the engineers will go on trial. But that's strikingly different from what happens to human drivers.

(BTW, who's going to pay speed fines? They shouldn't happen but I'm sure they will)

The whole point of corporations is juridical personhood -- that's not a US quirk.

Sure, but the US is especially bonkers with regard to the rights that person has.

Apparently corporations can have religious beliefs in the US.

My understanding has it that this is a disingenuous misconstrual of what happened in the Hobby Lobby case. It's not that the corporation has religious beliefs. It's that the owners do - where that set of owners is sufficiently small and sufficiently homogeneous that that's reasonably well defined. And that those beliefs don't lose protection just because they are acting through their corporation instead of acting as an individual.

I have, at least, misgivings about the ultimate decision - and certainly disagree with the religious beliefs claimed by the owners of Hobby Lobby - but I think we should deal with the actual arguments.

Algorithm's won't be persons till they can anonymously fund super pacs. ^_-

Well if company can be people, and companies can copyright/patent/own/protect algorithms they've developed, I guess it makes sense an associative properties sort of way that algorithms can be people...

Does that mean we can copyright people, so long as that can be described by an algorithm?

Would owning "Joe" make me a slave holder?

IBM's Watson for president 2016 http://watson2016.com/

I'm curious to see if some vehicles AI develop road-rage over a course of period as it goes through self optimization.

While I get the humor in your comment, I'd be curious if 'relaxing' some of the behavior parameters would result in some not-very-useful conclusions from testing:

"Tests indicate most efficient driving technique to include lots of honking, flashing high beams, and spraying winshield wiper fluid onto cars following too close on the highway."

In situations which usually induce anger in people on the roads, it seems more likely that any resulting behaviours resembling road rage only disadvantage the driver, if the goal is safety.

So if anything, wouldn't any sort of sufficiently global optimisation only veer the ai away from behaviours resembling road rage over time?

how do you define safety programmatically so the vehicle knows what's considered 'safe'? Measurement of g-force in sudden deceleration, acceleration, lateral movement? Heart beat per minute of passengers?

Most passenger cars are far more capable than average drivers can exploit, so there is quite a bit of room for cars to drive very aggressively from human's perspective, but completely 'safe' from machine's perspective.

Going one step further, some AI will be designed to be aggressive; for example, law enforcement, military, security escorts, etc. -- I'm guessing that will it is very likely that you're right that some consumer AI will be aggressive, if it become too common, it'll be shut down.

And Joe is owned by a corporation, which is considered a person, my friend.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood

wonder if i can swap out my driver mid-ride depending on neighborhood, weather conditions or my mood...

You already sort of can; 'sport mode' in most cars is effectively you, as the car's puppeteer, changing out the one persona for another of the AI "puppet" your commands execute through.

Can an algorithm have mens rea?

One might choose to define mens rea as the difference between a bug and a feature.