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!