[ExI] The second step towards immortality

[Martin Sustrik]

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On 02/01/14 00:43, Adrian Tymes wrote:

>> 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?

What about this?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escheat

"The term is often now applied to the transfer of the title to a
person's property to the state when the person dies intestate without
any other person capable of taking the property as heir. For example,
a common-law jurisdiction's intestacy statute might provide that when
someone dies without a will, and is not survived by a spouse,
descendants, parents, grandparents, descendants of parents, children
or grandchildren of grandparents, or great-grandchildren of
grandparents, then the person's estate will escheat to the state.

In some jurisdictions, escheat can also occur when an entity,
typically a bank, credit union or other financial institution, holds
money or property which appears to be unclaimed, for instance due to a
lack of activity on the account by way of deposits, withdrawals or any
other transactions for a lengthy time in a cash account. In many
jurisdictions, if the owner cannot be located, such property can be
revocably escheated to the state."

> 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).

I would say you are underestimating the power of cryptography. For
example, the program may be designed in such a way that the correct
authorisation info is only generated by an untampered with program.
Tampering with program would result in different (invalid)
authorisation info. There's also research going on wrt "fully
homomorphic encryption" which would allow programs to be run on 3rd
party servers without the 3rd party having access to the unencrypted
data. Etc.

> 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.

Which would mean destroying the money. Why would anyone want to do that?

Martin

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