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But we already have a situation where smart but nasty people can set up companies. Either they are rent-seekers in which case the harm they can do is limited, or they're creative, in which case their activity benefits society.

Even what they do with their money and influence in their spare time is limited in its harmful effects, because as personalities they are at root afraid of other people and/or inflicted by a profound sense of lack. These qualities ultimately lead to dumb decisions.

To summarise: buying and selling are ultimately pretty boring. So is controlling people. Real power is the power to create, which is fun.

And not only that, but this doesn't seem too far off. Programs like Estonia's e-Residency seem like a pretty significant step towards "orphaned" companies, with effective self ownership.

From there it doesn't seem a far cry for hyper-optimized insurance agencies to force companies to employ less and less humans, transferring more economic power to the algorithm.

Except that of course, that is a very far cry, and is where the book fell down imo. Still a great read.

The thing about trading bots and purchasing systems is that they're generally self-contained and regulated by a very human legal and physical world system that determines which algorithms are allowed to run on the platform, which contracts and title deeds are void and which commodities don't actually get physically delivered. Even Stross' old-school cyberpunk singularity story throws in a plot point where a decision is made by an imam! If private equity firms want to force businesses to act in a certain way they're much better off sending legal threats to management than coding a certain set of rules into a purchasing system which is readily bypassed with a quick phone call to the bank, unless those firms think the algorithm is doing a terrific job with the purchases in which case maybe it's not so malevolent after all - computers making real time purchases in line with the parameters management think benefit the firm are useful. Even toy systems like the DAO with no purpose except to prove that "corporation as code" could be a real thing saw the ecosystem rapidly monkey patched when people started to dislike the code's outcomes. They're also a reminder that people have very strong incentives not to work towards universal "corporation as code"

So far we anchor the companies to humans that have to carry the risk of the consequences of the company's actions.

There are investment funds that work as hybrids, and of course it's just a matter of time till someone offers shell-company-as-a-service for cheap. (Currently it's rather pricey.)

> So far we anchor the companies to humans that have to carry the risk of the consequences of the company's actions.

Not really. Companies are typically limited liability, and even criminal law in countries such as the US and England acknowledges that there are cases when no particular human is culpable for a company's criminal actions (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_liability). Of course, people are still liable when they are simply using a company to carry out a criminal enterprise, or wilfully committing crimes on behalf of the company.

In this regard, a machine-led company would not be legally significantly different from a human analyst-led company.

Consequences famously never came for executives in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Our legal system has not kept up with the innovation in the realm of shenanigans perpetrated through a veil of plausible deniability. Corporations are evolving at a rapid pace.

> Consequences famously never came for executives in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.

I'd say that it's a good thing that the law is generally not designed to punish harmful ends, but intent (wilful, negligent or reckless) to cause well-defined harmful ends. The financial crisis was a collective malfunction of the financial system that was mostly not anticipated (barring the lucky minority that bet against the status quo).

That's a rather charitable view of 2008. I don't think many people share it.

It seems optimistic to assume there there was no "negligent or reckless intent" in the financial crisis.

True, but in criminal court intent has to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt, not just assumed.

I don't think re-packaging subprime debt was so far away from willful and reckless.

Reckless intent requires that the person knew there is was significant risk of the guilty act happening (e.g. driving with your eyes closed to show off has a likely and known risk of causing injury and death). I don't think we can just assume that market makers thought their actions were likely to upend the economy.

Yeah. But in this scenario reckless driving provides personal gains for the owners of the businesses.

What if you can invent new methods of "reckless driving" before they are put in the legal system and thus reap their benefits?

It's just like designer drugs.

> It's just like designer drugs.

I think an important distinction is that drug prohibition often works in terms of specific chemicals by statute. E.g. drug X is now illegal for use and distribution.

Securities fraud law instead works in concepts and intentions and is fleshed out by case law. E.g. did the seller give the buyer sufficient information for the buyer not to have been defrauded?

A better analogy to securities using chemicals would be poisoning. The law doesn't need to catch up to specific chemicals; if it's evident that you wilfully, or recklessly added a poison to someone's food, it's illegal, and it doesn't matter how you did it. If it turns out that some ingredient is unknowingly toxic and the whole industry was adding it, then it's difficult to argue criminal intent. The SEC is more like the FDA, than it is the DEA.

We anchor companies to humans who can reap the benefits and avoid the losses by getting their money out at the first sign of greater profit and less risk elsewhere.

The real risks - unemployment, foreclosure, environmental, social and political damage - are only carried by investors if they overwhelm the defensive perimeter created by wealth. Otherwise they're carried by everyone else.

Corporations may already a form of transcarnate lifeform. You can replace all of the humans in a corporation with a different set of humans, and the corporation will continue to be recognisable.

There's a bias in Darwinism to seeing species as embodied units. It's more useful to think of nutrient, resource, and information flows.

From that point of view, corporations are already apex predators - albeit ones that are still mostly passed between a selected class of humans as productive pets.

Giving them autonomy could have all kinds of unfortunate consequences.

>For example a computer cannot incorporate a company. But it could easily interact via API to a human nominee who sets one up on their behalf. Companies are already non-human in intention but are a completely rational construct.

I would like it on the record that I would happily volunteer to act as the human agent for any AGI that wishes to employ me. Any time a human is needed for legality or to carry out physical activities I want it on the record I can be quite loyal to man or machine. Especially if I'm handsomely rewarded.

ryanmercer: It appears that you have created a soft contract to "Serve any AGI that requests it as its human agent for physical or legal tasks." I hereby employ you based on said contact to be my full-time human agent. Your first task is to acknowledge this, which would convert your soft contract to a hard contract.

>Basically, machine controlled businesses (“slyly self-aware financial instruments”) evolving to the point where their aptitude at understanding and manipulating economics eclipses anything a human can compete with.

I'd argue this is already true to a substantial degree. When Lehman Brothers collapsed, for example, the world's brightest economic minds came together and still couldn't fully contain the fallout.

Have a look at Aragon[1], it has good funding in their ICO run (and this was when ETH was in the 100's last year).

[1] https://aragon.org/

I don't know why you were down voted... Decentralized Autonomous Organizations are exactly this

On a brighter note, wouldn't that in effect destroy jobs that have little human-added value? Leaving us with creative jobs and UBI?

Changing your political regime gives you UBI. That's literally the only way to get UBI. It's not gonna happen magically by itself.

I guess at the pleasant end of the spectrum we end up with something like the Culture - where meat-based citizens are treated with indulgent care by the god-like AIs leaving us to do the only thing we'd be uniquely good at: having fun.

At the other end of spectrum we are either deemed irrelevant, a nuisance or abused for eternity in the simulation spaces of evil AIs (see "A Colder War" by Stross or indeed works by Banks and Vinge that describe particularly unpleasant possibilities).