Owners of AI-run firms would evade liability for "reckless" AI, US Rep. Comer says.

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[+] 3 points 1 week ago (1 child)
  • 72 comments in c/technology@lemmy.world view that post
    [–] 73 points 1 week ago (6 children)

    If these are relatively inexpensive to set up and dispose of, corporations could even set them up automatically for individual consumer transactions and between individual employees and themselves.

    For example, you go to a fast food restaurant, and you are actually being served by McGermKing Franchise 6d8f3cee-b10b-442b-b00b-02683a709f70 Ltd, founded 2 seconds ago, and leasing the right to operate in the building amongst other similar AI companies, as well as the part-time services of McGermKing Employment Services fd176cc4-bb95-4c1b-80e7-2aec39f02917, who hires a human to take your order, and McGermKing Employment Services 5336b4f1-0594-4df1-8387-5ec9b638db77, who assembles your GermBurger (TM used under licence by McGermKing Franchise 6d8f3cee-b10b-442b-b00b-02683a709f70 Ltd).

    If you pay them and they make money, it goes back to the owner. If you get food poisoning and sue McGermKing Franchise 6d8f3cee-b10b-442b-b00b-02683a709f70 Ltd (since the parent company is totally innocent and some other subsidiaries are just honest suppliers), it comes out of the money they made selling you the burger, and if their liability to you was higher than the cost of one burger, well, the AI corporation tried its honest best at business, but you can line up for your share of the payout - keeping in mind they also owe franchise fees to the parent company out of that burger, so the AI liquidator will divide up the assets, and if it doesn't cover liabilities, the parent company loses its 50c investment into McGermKing Franchise 6d8f3cee-b10b-442b-b00b-02683a709f70 Ltd, and how sad it was a bad outcome for you as a creditor.

    Likewise if an employee gets hurt, same story.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 week ago (3 children)

    That sounds like some shit straight out of Snowcrash. And then we got ICE buying a couple of robot dogs...

    “As part of Mr. Lee's good neighbor policy, all Rat Things are programmed never to break the sound barrier in a populated area. But Fido's in too much of a hurry to worry about the good neighbor policy. Jack the sound barrier. Bring the noise.”

    ― Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash

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  • [–] 3 points 1 week ago (2 children)

    Don't forget the electric shock torture gloves that ICE recently ordered.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 week ago

    Only if that costs as much as generating a UUID and making a request, because they already can make laws for themselves with no resistance.

    Otherwise a parent company has their butt in peril just because of that "parent" word. Pretty similarly to managing a database for some website.

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  • [–] 42 points 1 week ago

    "Welcome back to this week's episode of 'What Could Possibly Go Wrong?', and, oh boy, do we have a juicy one for you tonight!"

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  • [–] 41 points 1 week ago (8 children)

    Oh no, this AI company has started hiring hitmen to go after republican congressmen and senators 😱

    Welp, nothing we can do. They're incorporated in Delaware 🤷‍♂️

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  • [–] 4 points 1 week ago (6 children)

    Don't ai tend to lean to progressive anyways? They go stupid when you try to force them to be conservative.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 week ago (3 children)

    SpaceX.AI is working on that problem.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 week ago (2 children)
  • [–] 38 points 1 week ago (1 child)

    Sounds like this will be used to break laws and avoid responsibility. Just point to the black box to avoid fines and jail. A loophole for society to decend in to lawlessness and more corruption.

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  • [–] 9 points 1 week ago

    If you drive drunk, that's an offense even without causing road accidents. These people not only think this shouldn't be so when offloading decisions to a text predictor with different patterns of mistakes, they also seem to seriously mention possibility there should be no responsibility when those mistakes happen.

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  • [–] 31 points 1 week ago (6 children)

    So nobody is responsible for a technology that runs all our digital systems....wtf fuck are we doing?

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  • [–] 13 points 1 week ago (3 children)

    According to Ayn Rand, the favorite philosopher of the techbros, any regulation - including the most sensible ones - are made by mean and jealous people wanting to see kind and successful people fail.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 week ago (2 children)

    Ayn Rand is just a bolshevik inverted, but this aside, maintaining responsibility of a person for what they do with a new tool is not regulation.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 week ago (1 child)

    No, cause you see. Governments are violence and violence can only be used against direct violence (ie. shooting someone who shoots someone). Since this is social violence, that means that governments can't do anything. If you don't want unaccountable robot-run companies, you gotta bootstrap yourself to the highest echelon of society and stop it by being more efficient and profitable than them! /s

    Gods, I hate how much I fell for that shit as a teenager

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  • [–] 2 points 1 week ago

    I still fall for "that shit" if you mean libertarianism and not Ayn Rand (of that author I have the same opinion I had when first reading her book, it's hongweibing levels of intelligence).

    Libertarianism is very strictly based on personal responsibility for one's decisions. And someone playing with a "young nuclear physicist" set near others is being pretty much violent even when no accidents happen. Combining these two, it's pretty direct violence.

    That's not allowing even for a moment the thought that a person who turned on a machine that made an effect on the world loses one bit of responsibility for that effect because they used a machine.

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  • [–] [S] 113 points 1 week ago (2 children)

    We’ve finally automated the one thing executives wanted most: plausible deniability. Profits go to the human owners, bad decisions go to the algorithm, and victims get to sue a corporate shell with a chatbot for a CEO. Delaware isn’t building the future of business. It’s building the ultimate accountability escape room.

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  • [–] 20 points 1 week ago (1 child)
  • [–] 27 points 1 week ago*

    For those who don't know, delaware is basically three taxhavens in a trenchcoat pretending to be a state.

    This move is Delaware taking a bold step into 21st century ways of hiding the crimes and wealth of the rich.

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  • [–] 15 points 1 week ago

    Make infinite money. Make no mistakes.

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  • [–] 15 points 1 week ago (3 children)

    How long before an AI decides to sell drugs online? I wonder how the courts will handle it?

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  • [–] 12 points 1 week ago

    At first, I wondered why Comer would be opposing this sort of oligarchy-engineering. Maybe he's just sniffing around to get his cut? But it could be Niemöller's ghost finally rising to a level that reaches Comer.

    And the CEO said:

    • First they came for the artists, and I did not speak out because I have no heart.
    • Then they came for the writers, and I did not speak out because I have no soul.
    • Then they came for the actors, and I did not speak out because I have no emotions.
    • Then they came for the software engineers, and I did not speak out because I have no mind.
    • Then they came for the infosec people, and I did not speak out because I have no wisdom.
    • Then they came for me. And the artists, writers, actors, software engineers, and infosec people laughed derisively at me. So I called James Comer.

    The oligarchs might love this, but the third string C-suite execs that dine with Comer at the finest gas-station barbecue place in Paducah? The AIs have finally come for them.

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  • [–] 11 points 1 week ago*

    this technology will get a lot of people killed and it will only stop when it destroys enough elite families.

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  • [–] 11 points 1 week ago (2 children)

    Delaware is the state where a bunch of companies are legally but not physically headquartered, ro evade state taxes and regulations.

    States need to rethink their tax laws for companies: If you do business here, you pay taxes here.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 week ago (1 child)

    My former employer was a Delaware corporation, the company still has to pay our state taxes.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 week ago*

    According to Wikipedia: Delaware charges no income tax on corporations not operating within the state, so taking advantage of Delaware's other benefits does not result in taxation. At the same time, Delaware has a particularly aggressive tax on banks that locate in the state. However, in general, the state is viewed as a positive location for corporate tax purposes because favorable laws of incorporation allow companies to minimize corporate expenditures.

    So, yeah, I was oversimplifying.

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  • [–] 21 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (4 children)

    After investigation it was discovered the AI was designed to extract maximum profit fo the owners and hide business failings until it collapsed, leaving investors and creditors holding the debt.

    The courts fined the owners $50 each.

    Repeat.

    Just like all the crypto, AI, and app scams these days.

    Make big promises to inverstors, make a memecoin, steal all the data, pump and dump with the money and the courts don‘t do shit. Seems to be the Zoomer business model. Well, Trump‘s MAGA losers too.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 week ago (2 children)

    The real scam was capitalism?

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  • [–] 4 points 1 week ago (1 child)

    The scam is stupid voters not putting in politicians that look after their best interests. Any economic system can and will be twisted to funnel money upwards. In any case, if you're American you are not experiencing capitalism. People often say oligarchy, I think plutocracy is more on point, but it ain't capitalism.

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  • [–] 10 points 1 week ago (1 child)
  • [–] 18 points 1 week ago (7 children)

    The legal fiction of the corporate shield is leading our species to its doom. Profit without accountability encourages destructive behavior.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 week ago (3 children)

    What's the better idea? Without that legal fiction, new businesses would grind to a screeching halt and the entrenched monopolies would be even more powerful, as if that isn't the root of our economic problems already.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 week ago (1 child)

    The answer is not letting any company grow into a monopoly. There are actual laws against that. Break up existing monopolies. Then make business owners way more accountable than they are today. I know it is hard to prove intent in fraud cases, but any sort of creative accounting, transfer of debt between companies, bonuses that aren't in alignment with company performance, stock buybacks and other manipulations of valuation, and a myriad other obvious fraudulent behaviors should be punished with long prison time.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 week ago

    I've been screaming about monopolies for 3-years now. Everything people bitch about capitalism boils down to monopolies.

    BTW, stock buybacks used to be illegal until 1982. Ain't that a thing?

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  • [–] 1 point 1 week ago

    Without that legal fiction, new businesses would grind to a screeching halt

    Thats not true though. The world abounded in businesses before the modern corporation and it will after.

    There's no way that making the board or c-suite personally liable could increase the power of monopolies. It would encourage smaller corps with less centralized risk.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 week ago (2 children)

    What do you mean by "corporate shield"? Are you referring to limited liability? Corporations are still accountable for the laws that they break.

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  • [–] 17 points 1 week ago (3 children)

    Isn't Delaware a famous tax haven?

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  • [–] 2 points 1 week ago

    Delaware is often used at a location for companies because it has a very well documented and court proven legal foundation.

    It eliminates a lot of the uncertainty in running a business from a legal standpoint because most cases are already settled by someone else.

    Texas is the new hotness from a tax standpoint cause it gets its money from other sources, like property tax.

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  • [–] 8 points 1 week ago

    Anything except banking

    Quick add AI to your bittorrent clients, and take deposits for your crypto/gambling exchanges!

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  • [–] 7 points 1 week ago

    They're really rushing to leave the bleakest cyberpunk distopia in the dust.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 week ago

    Dr. Guillotine would like a word...

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  • [–] 6 points 1 week ago

    An AI led business is a very important building block of rogue AI finishing off humankind. How else will it secure enough unsupervisable compute?

    I hate it how these people take every warning of things that could go wrong as advise for policy.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 week ago

    So, basically just like human led companies?

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  • [–] 2 points 1 week ago

    of all the people, its comer saying this.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 week ago (2 children)

    The quote used as the title of the article isn't accurate. The owner of the company would still be a human, so there would be a human at the helm.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 week ago (1 child)

    Isn't one of their towns giving votes to corporations?

    Like, what the hell Delaware? Why do you keep ruining things for the rest of us?

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  • [–] -2 points 1 week ago*

    AI-run business could be beneficial if done for the benefit of all humanity. Instead, people are using it for personal gain at the expense of others.

    We need to criminalize this type of greed so, so badly.

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