[ExI] The second step towards immortality

[Adrian Tymes]

On Wed, Jan 1, 2014 at 2:39 PM, Martin Sustrik <sustrik at 250bpm.com> wrote:

> On 01/01/14 23:26, Adrian Tymes wrote:
> >> The point is that however you do it, the resulting entity will be
> >> able to affect the physical world on equal standing with people
> >> actually alive, rather than being just a curiosity to be
> >> exhibited in a museum.
> >
> > Only as much as, say, a foundation can.  The foundation makes its
> > own decisions as best it can, though it may be confined by the
> > algorithms, directives, or whatever that its founder set up.
>
> Are we speaking of US law? Is it theoretically possible to set up a
> foundation with no human officers? I had once created an US
> corporation and appointing a whole bunch of officers was required. The
> foundation may be different though. If so, it would open interesting
> possibilities w.r.t. legal status of AI.
>

It is possible, though it takes more doing than just creating it
straight-up.  Consider: what happens if you create a foundation, and then
all the officers die, with rights explicitly reverting to the foundation?

There are also such things as corporate bank accounts, which require a
chain of human authorization but ultimately belong to the corporation, not
the individuals who happen to have signature authority on it at any one
time.

That said, an autonomous program giving out bitcoins would be considered to
have "property" - the bitcoins - which could be seized as well as any other
property (modulo the difficulty of seizing bitcoins, but if it's just a
defenseless program running somewhere then people can get at its code, and
from that get the authorization details to drain its wallets).

There's also the matter of paying for server space and runtime.  Which
could be part of the program's directives, to be sure, but whoever owns the
server (or the Internet connection) can later decide to pull the plug and
stop the program.  The program can't negotiate: that requires information
and context generally not available when it's written.
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