
Machine-owned enterprises are inevitable - jstanley
http://incoherency.co.uk/blog/stories/machine-owned-enterprises.html
======
jpollock
"The obvious way for such an enterprise to begin is for the owner of a human-
owned business to automate away as much of his work as possible, and then to
die without leaving the business to anybody else. The business would simply
continue to take payments, provide services, and pay bills, until something
catastrophic happened that it couldn't respond to automatically."

This depends on the location the original owner is resident in. In many cases,
if the owner dies without an heir or will, their assets go to the state [1].

[1] [http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/how-estate-settled-
if...](http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/how-estate-settled-if-
theres-32442.html)

~~~
pzone
Yeah it doesn't make sense. In the United States, all assets are owned by:

1\. Households (aka private individuals)

2\. Nonprofits

3\. The state

This is an accounting identity. Now it would be interesting to think about a
machine-run nonprofit (are there legal restrictions to this?) owning machine-
run enterprises.

~~~
dragonwriter
I think you want:

1\. Natural persons

2\. Non-state juridical persons (loosely, corporations, including non-
profits).

3\. State entities

~~~
pzone
No, because all corporations are owned by other entities.

------
joshuaheard
Interesting theory, however, a machine cannot own property, only a person can.
If someone dies without heirs, as in the article's example, the property
escheats (transfers) to the state. If property is lost or abandoned, someone
new can claim ownership to it. So, even if a machine could "own" an
enterprise, someone else could claim ownership to the machine.

An enterprise can be autonomous, for instance with a blockchain. But to be
legally recognizable, it would still need someone to interface with meatspace.
Even a corporation has an Agent for Service of Process, a real person to
interact with the real world of living persons.

~~~
crgt
If a river can be declared a person, it's not clear to me why a machine can't
also be a legal person. Or, for that matter, if corporations have legal
personhood, why not machines?
[http://www.economist.com/news/asia/21719409-odd-legal-
status...](http://www.economist.com/news/asia/21719409-odd-legal-status-
intended-help-prevent-pollution-and-other-abuses-new-zealand-declares)

~~~
pavel_lishin
> _Even a corporation has an Agent for Service of Process, a real person to
> interact with the real world of living persons._

~~~
dsp1234
Yes, corporations hire living persons to be the Agent for Service of Process.

What prevents a machine from hiring a living person in the same fashion?

~~~
notahacker
If one or more humans act as the named owner for legal purposes and are
benefiting financially from the arrangement, in what sense is the business not
owned by humans?

~~~
crgt
The machine is free to declare other persons the benificiary of any business
activities should it decide that is in its best interest.

------
Communitivity
Charles Stross addressed this concept tangentially in his fiction novel
"Accelerando",
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerando](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerando).

Joan D. Vinge also addressed AI owned corporations in her "Cat" series,
[https://www.goodreads.com/series/40790-cat](https://www.goodreads.com/series/40790-cat).

I think Ethereum, XDI, and other attempts at smart contract technologies are
laying the foundation for this now,
[https://www.ethereum.org/ether](https://www.ethereum.org/ether). So are new
automated digital identity technologies such as Sovrin,
[https://github.com/WebOfTrustInfo/rebooting-the-web-of-
trust...](https://github.com/WebOfTrustInfo/rebooting-the-web-of-trust-
fall2016/blob/master/topics-and-advance-readings/Sovrin--digital-identities-
in-the-blockchain-era.pdf).

I also think that the need for liability and taxes will drive incorporating
the concept of an intelligent software agent as a legal corporate entity, such
that the assets of that entity are at risk from liability lawsuits, that
profits are taxed, and that the fiduciary responsibilities of such an entity
are defined. I think the author does not distinguish between self-owning and
self-directed, the two do not necessarily go hand in hand.

It's a whole new field of law, and business, and should be an interesting
thing to be a part of and/or observe. Usual caveat applies, IANAL and TINLA
(This is not legal advice).

------
vkou
Machine-owned enterprises already exist. Any sufficiently large corporation,
with a sufficiently diffused ownership structure qualifies. The governance of
such corporations can be described as an artificial super-intelligence, that
is often malevolent to human interests (It will happily optimize for paper-
clips, or whatnot.)

~~~
avn2109
Steinbeck agreed with you, many years ago:

"The bank is something else than men. It happens that every man in a bank
hates what the bank does, and yet the bank does it. The bank is something more
than men, I tell you. It's the monster. Men made it, but they can't control
it."

[0]
[https://books.google.com/books?id=ClXiwSYzjtYC&pg=PA33&dq=th...](https://books.google.com/books?id=ClXiwSYzjtYC&pg=PA33&dq=the+bank+is+something+else+than+men&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi9t6Sy4OrSAhVlhlQKHY3bBX8Q6AEIKTAC#v=onepage&q=%22bank%20is%20something%20else%20than%20men%22&f=false)

~~~
cat199
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golem#The_Golem_of_Che.C5.82m](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golem#The_Golem_of_Che.C5.82m)

------
kafkaesq
Pretty weird, as far as rants go. Of course he doesn't begin to define what he
means by "self-owning", exactly - nor does the article he links to define the
term (or, recursively, the article that _it_ links to). Nor should they bother
trying -- because it's basically oxymoron.

~~~
ouid
Why is self-ownership an oxymoron? It seems fairly self-descriptive, as a
term. One of the primary axioms of ownership is that it is conserved. Two
entities cannot both wholly own the same entity. It is then very natural to
say that an entity for which no one else claims ownership owns itself. This
way the sum of all ownership sums to 1.

~~~
kafkaesq
_This way the sum of all ownership sums to 1._

QED, I guess. Meanwhile, down on Planet Earth, we have the perfectly obvious
and natural question: when one of those vehicles (inevitably) plunges into a
school bus full o' kids, _and_ is found to have done so as a result of
criminal negligence -- who's going to jail? Once you've identified those
parties -- you know, the _human beings_ who will be held accountable for the
aforementioned negligence -- you've identified the "de-facto" owners of these
vehicles, by any meaningful definition.

Or if you (truly believe) the answer is "no one" \-- as in, "Aw shucks! Nobody
owns these cars, you see! Just some blobs of white noise on the blockchain!
You can't even trace 'em! BTW sorry 'bout all those poor kids, but you know,
stuff happens" \-- then at least we've identified the "self-ownership" fad for
what it is: just another libertarian smokescreen to maximize the potential for
financial gain whilst minimizing (or in this case, _voiding entirely_ ) the
personal responsibility (and _accountability_ ) that otherwise -- in a sane
world -- would go hand-in-hand with such activity.

~~~
ouid
You called it an oxymoron, which was wrong. Lots of things own themselves. If
you have a problem with the man's article, articulate it better, or be
prepared to be called wrong.

~~~
kafkaesq
_Lots of things own themselves._

Can you name a _single instance_ of a complex, industrially produced item (let
alone one interacts with our day-to-day world in a significant way; _and_ is
quite inherently possessed of the ability to kill human beings) -- that "owns
itself"?

~~~
cr0sh
Why are complex, non-industrially produced items which interact with our day-
to-day world in a significant way, and are quite inherently possessed of the
ability to kill human beings, which _do_ own themselves (well, in most cases -
but unfortunately not all) - somehow different?

I mean - we've come up with solutions for those items - so why couldn't we do
the same with industrially produced items which have the same characteristics
you've posited?

------
rm_-rf_slash
This piece is about 50% interesting ideas/concepts, and 50% meaningless and
fanciful thoughts with little bearing on reality.

Let's start with the acknowledged barriers: no rational person would create an
AI to run a business and then leave the business to cut themselves out of the
profits. And even if so laws exist to require those assets to be willed to
heirs lest they become property of the state.

But this brings about a more serious question: when we are at the point where
an AI is capable enough of performing _all_ business actions (including tax
filing, legal issues, maintenance, and so on), it is very likely that the AI
will be highly intelligent and cognizant of the world around it. In other
words, it will be self-aware. It has to be, or else it will eventually be
limited by reliance on human actors to handle edge cases.

So here we have a self-aware AI content with running a business at margin as
the purpose for its existence? I doubt it.

This piece fails to ask the VERY BIG QUESTIONS about advanced artificial
intelligence: Will AI someday legally own property? And if so, what's the
limit? Land? IP? The rights to the music it makes?

What then? Will it also want legal protections? Fourth amendment rights
against illegal search and seizure of its (physical and digital) assets and
neural network? Full citizenship? First amendment rights?

Almost nobody seems to be asking these inevitable questions, and their
inevitable answers will irrevocably shape our species. I'll be enrolling in
grad school for AI this fall, so maybe that's up to me.

~~~
radarsat1
> Almost nobody seems to be asking these inevitable questions

Actually, I see these questions being asked more and more and more these days,
and I find it hilarious. What with the EU recently discussing robot rights and
such.

I mean, although I understand that these are interesting intellectual
questions, I just get the impression that people are really having fun
contemplating them, but realistically not admitting (as often as I'd like) how
_insanely_ far away we are from anything where any of this is even remotely
relevant.

Call me when a robot can tie his own shoelaces and we'll talk.

~~~
rm_-rf_slash
Your conflation of motor skills with mental acuity is setting your face up for
a healthy portion of egg. Stephen Hawking can't tie his shoelaces either.

Even if we are, say, a century away from synthetic humans, we may be much much
closer to a self-aware AI, even if it can only exist inside computer hardware.

The future will come sooner than is convenient. None of America's founding
fathers had a sustainable long-term answer to slavery. It took a civil war to
sort that through and racism still plagues this nation.

So what's there to lose by speculating before it's far too late?

~~~
notahacker
> Your conflation of motor skills with mental acuity is setting your face up
> for a healthy portion of egg. Stephen Hawking can't tie his shoelaces
> either.

I assume the OP's point is that in an era where we've struggled to program
machines with sufficient ingenuity to master relatively simple motor skills
(despite considerable financial incentives to do so) it's more than a little
premature to conclude it's "inevitable" that we will end up creating machines
with such sophisticated reasoning skills it can run a functioning business
without losing out to human suppliers, contractors, customers and clients that
all want to profit at its expense (despite no incentive to create a single
machine that could do this, and considerable incentive not to grant it full
self-ownership if such a single machine were nevertheless created).

~~~
rm_-rf_slash
I forget the name but there was a passive income post here a few months back
about a neural network that created logos and earned the creator thousands of
dollars a month.

That seems like something an AI could run on its own, no?

I'm not exactly saying it's a small step from that to managing a grocery
chain.

~~~
notahacker
I'm not sure that every automated process that generates an output after
evidence of payment is produced qualifies as a business. Otherwise I've got a
box full of businesses (old shareware CDs) lying around somewhere

Software might be able to cope with commerce to the extent of churning out
logos based on a predefined input parameters in response to a payment received
token, but it's rather less adept at finding new ways of reaching or serving
customers or dealing with other day to day stuff like taxes or complaints[1].
Which is probably why LogoJoy, the project you're referring to, is hiring...

[1]not to mention an AI without the ability to testify in court but with a
direct line to a vault of cash being a magnet for crackers, hustlers and
thieves

------
spikels
I'm not sure "machine-owned" should be the focus. Ownership is a legal
construct and I don't think a machine can "own" anything in any existing legal
framework. And typically anything "not owned" reverts to the state.

Seems that the defining feature is autonomy, not ownership.

------
mistercow
I think you're pretty overconfident in your conclusions, but I also think this
is an absolutely fascinating concept.

I also see some places where you might be too pessimistic. For example, it
seems relatively plausible that a machine-owned business could do things that
require human workers for its primary functions. Just as an algorithm might be
able to hire a lawyer, it could hire contractors to do other parts of the core
business. All that's required is that all of the _managerial_ tasks are
automated.

But I definitely think that this falls apart when you start thinking about the
law. The business has to deal not only with lawsuits against itself, but also
with enforcing its rights against other people. For example, in the self-
owned-taxi example, what is to prevent someone from simply ripping the
computer out of the taxi, wiping it, and then making off with a free car?
What's to prevent a mechanic, hired to do basic repairs, from simply selling
the car for parts? Preventing this requires that the machine can recognize
violations of the law that hurt it, and then take legal action against the
perpetrator. That sounds like strong AI territory.

But once we're talking about strong AI, all bets are off. It's just a much
less interesting proposal. It's not a particularly surprising conclusion that
if you have machines with superhuman generalized intelligence, they'll
probably end up owning and running businesses.

~~~
BatFastard
For an interesting investigation of the subject read Daemon

[http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6665847-daemon](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6665847-daemon)

I would be happy to work for it.

------
jaredhansen
This seems a good place to post a link to a very famous law review article
called Should Trees Have Standing?[1], which discusses whether we should grant
"standing" (which, put simply, is the right to sue someone for violating some
right of yours) to trees and other features of the natural world.

I'm simplifying a bit, but that's the gist of it. The article had tremendous
impact and today is required reading for many first-year law students. It is
informed by / has informed quite a bit of the debate around environmental
protection law, and the analysis seems like it should be relevant to questions
of machines as well.

Disclaimer: I haven't read the article since law school, and don't have time
to do so now. But these kinds of questions (even before we get to something
like reasonably good AGI, but especially so afterward) are only going to
become more important, so I think this is a good place to plug this thought-
provoking article.

[1]
[https://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic498371.files/Sto...](https://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic498371.files/Stone.Trees_Standing.pdf)

------
eveningcoffee
I wouldn’t so restrictive. I think it would be sufficient to call a company
machine owned when over 50% is owned by a machine. I do not see why it could
not hire humans to advance its goals.

------
wyldfire
> The obvious way for such an enterprise to begin is for the owner of a human-
> owned business to automate ... and then to die without leaving the business
> to anybody ... This is a relatively weak form of machine-owned enterprise,
> and probably something more deliberate and strong-AI-powered would be
> required to ensure long-term survival ...

The novel "Daemon" [1] poses a posthumous launch of an AI bent on altering the
world order. It holds corporations hostage and uses them to accumulate more
corporations.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daemon_(novel_series)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daemon_\(novel_series\))

~~~
noir_lord
I loved that series, it wasn't the finest writing but the pages turned quickly
and his background as a SA/SE shown through in the technology descriptions.

If you liked those and haven't yet checkout "Maximum Impact" and "Seven
Seconds" by Jack Henderson for more semi-plausible stuff set in the current
world.

Also in case you aren't aware Suarez has a new book out in April :).

------
tlack
I feel like many of the problems he mentions could be solved by having the
machine hire humans.

For instance, imagine the machine publishes a list of "open communications-
related tasks" on a marketplace of some kind and a small team (or teams) could
accept the task for a few months, to be paid in bitcoin.

Likewise, the machine could pay humans or other bots for "work" sent to it
(such as conversations) via an API, so for instance a team might do the
integration with a popular chat app on behalf of the machine, without the
machine even really knowing.

------
LeoPanthera
Machine-owned and operated businesses are a plot point in Charles Stross'
novel "Accelerando", a story about living through the technological
singularity.

------
julie1
I want to sue you, your frelated milk killed my cat!

 _robotic voice_ You cannot. Ah ah! I am irresponsible since I do not qualify
as having proven to understand what the public interest is, freedom or even
humor... I am just a puppet in the hand of those who feed me with data and
code.

[Klong] noises of a dwarf moving inside of the machinery.

 _robotic voice_ Let's have a nice chess game instead, and enjoy my mechanical
Türk.

------
Procrastes
This is like some fun bit of backstory from Charles Stross' novel
ACCELERANDO[1].

1\. [http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-
static/fiction/accelera...](http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-
static/fiction/accelerando/accelerando-intro.html)

------
Paul-ish
I hope this never happens. What happens when we can't hold people liable for
their actions anymore? Punishment isn't very meaningful for machines, as
suffering isn't integral to their experience.

If we give robots agency, we risk creating something that can be scapegoated.

------
balozi
As I see it the #1 impediment to the success of the machine-owned enterprise
is that in the real world said machine would be forced into transacting with
inherently irrational actors (humans).

Well...unless the intention is to ...you know...do away with these irrational
actors.

~~~
LarryPage
"I want to speak to your manager!"

"Beep boop, I am the manager."

 _progress bar freezes_

------
EternalData
The really interesting thing that will come out of this, I think, is defining
what are usually human-only attributes. The notion of ownership being anything
less than associated with individual humans was displaced by the mythology of
joint-stock companies, which can own things as an extension of the will of
many humans. Now when you're explicitly talking about ownership by entities
perceived as non-human -- that could get interesting very fast.

------
return0
I no longer think artificial intelligence is artificial. The machines
obviously suck that intelligence from bloggers' heads.

------
blackhaz
I would add that there will always remain someone--the owner of the machine--
who acts as the creative force powering his business innovation. This master
puppeteer is the one who will be paying taxes, until we teach machines to be
creative and take business decisions based on what the algorithm has just
dreamt.

------
mozey
> But if a hot new chat app becomes popular

...Lord have mercy, not another one!

------
mcbruiser3
machines are property, they are owned, not owners, so to say it's inevitable
is quite a stretch of the imagination.

