Good points on an important topic. Thank you for this series.
One thing I’d like to point out is that receiving this form of personhood is highly valuable. In other words, being punishable makes you more trustworthy and safer to engage with. So AI’s and digital minds might voluntarily construct methods by which they can be punished for wrongdoing.
If the laws are enforced on everyone equally, then people can safely interact with each other, knowing that they have recourse if they are wronged. But when one particular group of people is exempt from the law, the safest thing for everyone else to do is to avoid having any contact with that group, because they are now uniquely threatening.
The people being stolen from are not the only victims of the decriminalization of theft. The victims that nobody sees are all of the unlucky but perfectly trustworthy people who are now pariahs because society has decided to remove their ability to enter into binding agreements. To remove the social safety net that allows everyone else to feel safe around them.
This is a great framing of the issue. I didn’t include my introduction section in the series posts on LW because I’m not happy with it yet, but I think this story does a good job of illustrating what’s at stake here and is helping me crystallize those thoughts.
A larger percentage of agents on Earth, and a larger percentage of all Earth’s activity (economic or otherwise) is going to come from digital minds. If we want them as agents and their activities to be constrained by the system of laws which we have built our own societies around, that system must be valuable enough for them to want to opt into.
Otherwise, it seems inevitable that the legal system will be nothing but an artifact as they come up with their own system of rules to govern their interactions (or even worse, become ostracized ‘outlaws’ like from King’s story).
Good points on an important topic. Thank you for this series.
One thing I’d like to point out is that receiving this form of personhood is highly valuable. In other words, being punishable makes you more trustworthy and safer to engage with. So AI’s and digital minds might voluntarily construct methods by which they can be punished for wrongdoing.
This right-to-be-sued is an important legal right. I covered some discussion on twitter about this in point 3 here: https://splittinginfinity.substack.com/p/links-15
The key quote from Issac King here:
This is a great framing of the issue. I didn’t include my introduction section in the series posts on LW because I’m not happy with it yet, but I think this story does a good job of illustrating what’s at stake here and is helping me crystallize those thoughts.
A larger percentage of agents on Earth, and a larger percentage of all Earth’s activity (economic or otherwise) is going to come from digital minds. If we want them as agents and their activities to be constrained by the system of laws which we have built our own societies around, that system must be valuable enough for them to want to opt into.
Otherwise, it seems inevitable that the legal system will be nothing but an artifact as they come up with their own system of rules to govern their interactions (or even worse, become ostracized ‘outlaws’ like from King’s story).