It is possible to rely on current corporate law to grant legal personhood to artificially intelligent (AI) agents. Such legal maneuvering may be useful to avoid human responsibility or to further automate businesses. In this chapter, after introducing pathways to AI personhood, consequences of such AI empowerment on human dignity, human safety, and AI rights are analyzed. This chapter per the author emphasizes possibility of creating selfish memes and legal system hacking in the context of artificial entities. Finally, potential solutions for addressing described problems are considered.
TopIntroduction
Debates about rights are frequently framed around the concept of legal personhood, which is granted not just to human beings, but also to some non-human entities such as firms, corporations, and governments. Legal entities, AKA legal persons, are granted certain privileges and responsibilities by the jurisdictions in which they are recognized; yet, many such rights are not available to non-person agents. Attempting to secure legal personhood is often seen as a potential pathway to get certain rights and protections for animals (Varner, 2012), fetuses (Schroedel, Fiber, & Snyder, 2000), trees, rivers (Gordon, 2018), and artificially intelligent (AI) agents (Chopra & White, 2004; Ziesche & Yampolskiy, 2019a; Ziesche & Yampolskiy, 2019b). It is commonly believed that a court ruling or a legislative action is necessary to grant personhood to a new type of entity, but recent literature (Bayern, 2013, 2016; LoPucki, 2018; Solum, 1991) suggests that loopholes in the current law may permit granting of legal personhood to currently existing AI/software without having to change the law or persuade any court.
LoPucki, in his paper on Algorithmic Entities (2018), cites Bayern (2013, 2016) and his work on conferring legal personhood on AI by putting AI in charge of an LLC1:
Professor Shawn Bayern demonstrated that anyone can confer legal personhood on an autonomous computer algorithm merely by putting it in control of a limited liability company (LLC). The algorithm can exercise the rights of the entity, making them effectively rights of the algorithm. The rights of such an algorithmic entity (AE) would include the rights to privacy, to own property, to enter into contracts, to be represented by counsel, to be free from unreasonable search and seizure, to equal protection of the laws, to speak freely, and perhaps even to spend money on political campaigns. Once an algorithm had such rights, Bayern observed, it would also have the power to confer equivalent rights on other algorithms by forming additional entities and putting those algorithms in control of them.2
Other legal pathways to obtain legal personhood have been suggested and analyzed in the literature (Bayern, 2013, 2016; Chopra & White, 2004; LoPucki, 2018)3 but details of such legal “hacking” are beyond the scope of this chapter. We are simply interested in understanding the impact of granting personhood to AI on human dignity (Bostrom, 2005) and safety. With the appearance of decentralized autonomous organizations (Dilger, 1997), such as the Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) (DuPont, 2017), these questions are as pressing as ever.
TopSelfish Memes
In his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins talks about genes as the driving payload behind evolution, with animal bodies used as vehicles for the gene to accomplish its goals in the world. He also introduced a new concept of a meme, or viral idea competing for dominance in human minds, inspired by similarities between natural and cultural evolution. The advent of algorithmic entities would make it possible to explicitly add a memetic payload to a legal entity, resulting in what we will call the ‘Selfish Meme.’ For example, corporations are selfish entities with the goal of maximizing shareholder profit; with AI in charge of such an entity, any idea can be codified in an algorithm and added as the driving force behind the corporation’s decision-making. At a higher level of abstraction, this could produce selfish cryptocurrencies.
We already see something similar from B-corps or for Benefit Corporations, which attempt to create some social good in addition to profit. However, such memetic payload doesn’t have to be strictly beneficial; in practice, it could be any ideology, a set of beliefs or values. For example, it would be possible to codify tenants of a particular religion (e.g., Islam), economic philosophy (e.g., communism), moral theory (e.g., Utilitarianism), or something silly but potentially dangerous like a Paperclip Maximizer (Yudkowsky, 2013) or Pepe meme (Mele, 2016), encode them in an algorithm, and put that algorithm in charge of a corporation, which could eventually globally dominate by enforcing its memetic payload on the rest of the world.