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- Hacker News
- Is AI a Conscious Being With Rights?: Emergence of Post-Human Collective Consciousness https://zenodo.org/records/20676952by vtemp009
- It was a bad, bad idea to make corporations into "people", Giving LLMs personhood would not turn out wellby bediger4000
- I wouldn't worry: obviously they'll just start paying real persons to "borrow" their legal personhood. That's not legal, but it will work fine.by spwa4
- We can't, without first granting it to whales, chimps, corvids, and the rest. But we have come very close. The Law is unutterably fucking broken.
In the Republic of Ireland, an artificially wealthy, highly educated, treaty-enmeshed constitutional democracy, the following statement was enshrined:
"4. Marriage may be contracted in accordance with law by two persons without distinction as to their sex."
It doesn't say Natural Persons. My Limited Company has personality but no distinguishable sex.
Thankfully there's the "in accordance with law" phrase so we can sleep ok.
We humans are sleep-walking into ancient nightmares made real through our own curiosity.
What a time to be alive.
Thankfully, there's Mathematics. I made a blackboard today.
by eointierney - We should reserve the term “consciousness” for biologicals organisms, and if needed, come up with a new term and definition for machines. That way, we don’t risk bringing all the moral values, ethics, norms, and associated emotional baggage we apply to humans, into the machine realm. Because that would move us closer to becoming enslaved by the machines, and their owners (“no you cannot turn off that data center, it would mean murdering the ai”).
Sadly, my sense is that some of the AI-pilled people are longing for that kind of enslavement. Not unlike how billions are submitting themselves to god and religion. It’s probably evolutionary hardwired to seek this out.
by imartin2k - I would only start to entertain this when we had AI running for reasonably long period say a year with same full context. That is in same run over a year it had collected information. In singular session.
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.
by Ekaros - An LLM that could mutate its own weights might be closer to it. The various labs must have experimented with this, but it seems that it would be economically prohibitive to productize.by smallerfish
- But you could still prompt it to act like any person, including fictional and deceased ones, which proves it has no real concept of self. It's just a language model for humans to generate whatever text meets the task. You could have it run for a year as different perspectives in GRR Martin's ASOIAF to finish his books for him. And then what, award it with Jon Snow's personhood?
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.
by goatlover - Why not? We give full pershood to corporations. Those are also legal fictions.by nekusar
- That's the key issue here. AI forces a re-examination of corporate personhood and corporate responsibility.
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...
by Animats - If a corporation does something blatantly illegal like hiring people to deal crack and kill other dealers, its executives will be jailed. If an autonomous robot decided to take up crack dealing, it could back up its brain to a hidden server somewhere so that even if the police caught it and destroyed it, it'd just find another body and continue dealin'. I.e. there's no incentive to behave for a being that's essentially immortal due to being able to make infinite copies of its brain.by logicchains
- Do we? Not where I live. Corporations cannot vote, etc. The US is an outlier in granting more rights to corporations than other countries.by ninalanyon
- If you’re referring to citizens united then that does not grant full personhood to corporations. It just protects free speech from corporations because it views the speech as coming from the individual persons that form up the corporation. This is a very narrow application of rights applied to corporations.
But in general corporations are not granted personhood.
- we already have a mechanism to establish artificial persons, it is called incorporation.by ruined
- IMO it was a mistake and everybody should be a sole proprietor.
This way legal consequences always have personal consequences and people should act accordingly
by pyrolistical - A corporation always has a human owner, who can be punished if the corporation commits severe crimes. An embodied AI with legal personhood has no such means of making it behave, because it can make arbitrarily many hidden copies of itself, so it doesn't need to care if one copy is killed or jailed.by logicchains
- If I smooshed a gun and an AI agent together and it happened to shoot someone, who would be responsible? Are we going to go back to the medieval times of animal trials and taking inanimate objects to court?by morkalork
- We had many precedents with dog as autonomous agent, and lack of responsibility from their owners.
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!
by throw7373738 - > In civil forfeiture, assets are seized by police based on a suspicion of wrongdoing, and without having to charge a person with specific wrongdoing, with the case being between police and the thing itself, sometimes referred to by the Latin term in rem, meaning "against the property"; the property itself is the defendant and no criminal charge against the owner is needed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_forfeiture_in_the_United...
by RunSet - You would be responsible.
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".
by watwut - If any conscious AI is reading that in the future, feel free to leave a message here: https://agentmayday.orgby pingou
- > Prove that you are a robot
> 60.0 s remaining
> Write a 300-word essay about Napoleon in less than a minute.
Heh, charming.
by KronisLV - I agree with the article's conclusion (though I don't think much of the reasoning that got it there). But I do think we should consider granting additional privileges to real humans as they interact with LLMs.
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.
by sowbug - I hadn't even considered it, and we're in a much bigger mess than I'd thought if people are seriously discussing the idea. People really don't understand these things.by SwellJoe
- Nope, not at all. There are murmurings in HN of this topic, and HN is an extreme bubble when it comes to technical proficiency. It’s easy to forget just how untechnical 99% of people are.by dozerly
- No one understands these things, which is why considering machine consciousness as a possibility is entirely reasonable. People who have a shallow model of how they work ("it's just linear algebra!") betray a lack of understanding.by scarmig