Yet the ultimate blame is going to find a human when something illegal happens. Because 'ownership' is a human concept

Factor out ownership and responsibility diffusely enough, and blame-finding has a tough time obtaining traction, not to speak of yielding convictions. The law has yet to come to satisfactory grips that while ownership and responsibility can seem to go willy-nilly all over the planet, and indeed over time, benefits converge and accrue to an obvious group...who legally disclaim responsibility and ownership. All sorts of rent-seeking and externalizing behavior flows from that discrepancy.

Ultimate blame when something illegal happens in a machine-owned enterprise is likely to remain just as difficult to pin down as it was with the 2008 Great Recession, if not manifestly more difficult.

The question is if you accept that a machine can take blame. If it cant, you cant diffuse responsibility even to a million machines

It isn't necessary in today's legal and regulatory climate the world over to resolve the question of acceptance that a machine can take legal blame. We already have structures in place that enable practical financial and operational control while at the same time effectively deflecting away blame through factoring and diffusing responsibility. Nearly all of the 0.1% wealthy's forms of tax efficiency schemes absolutely depend upon this principle. There are any number of tax planners that will be happy to talk details with you about the starter kit versions of these schemes for a five-figure entry fee, and every single one of the substantive vehicles I investigated depended upon this principle.

These same vehicles can be used by machines that own enterprises. They might not be on the masthead/letterhead of the enterprise, but that hardly matters unless a currently-unknown prerequisite to AGI or AI sufficient to run an an enterprise is the machine equivalent of a childish human ego.

Erm. No. Corporations can and do shield their owners from legal liability, only in the most blatant cases will the corporate veil be pierced, otherwise 'limited liability' does what it says on the tin.

For officers of the company it is a different matter, but even there punishment beyond being fired is very rare.

Thats for financial liability. What if the machine makes a crime?

Many corporations have been found guilty of crimes. Rarely did an officer of those companies get sent to jail, most of the times even though a person committing that same crime would end up in jail officers of the company are not charged and instead the corporation pays a fine.

More data on this subject than you can absorb in a few days:

http://lib.law.virginia.edu/Garrett/plea_agreements/home.php...

Aside from discretionary charging, it's fundamentally possible for a company to be guilty of a crime without any individual officer being guilty of that crime.

Yes. That's a bit paradoxical but correct and one of the ways in which corporate crimes end up being dealt with differently than crimes committed by natural persons.