The amount of autonomy that makes something a “person” has only ever been drastically understated in these sorts of discussions, I find. Like saying a future self-driving taxi would own its own business and keep its profits. That’s like giving a self-driving tractor the deed to the farm. It’s easy to personify things that demonstrate some amount of “agency” (moving around on their own, making decisions), I guess, but lots of things do that and it doesn’t make them legal people who can own property and the like. Even if it made sense to give a deed to a tractor, no one would do it.
You're making me regret my decision to setup my Roomba as the sole asset of a corporation owned by the Roomba itself. It seemed like the moral, ethical thing to do, but it doesn't even cash its paychecks.
Yea, in this analogy you already own the tractor, so you already own the tractor's money. I don't think I'm going on a limb by saying that isn't slavery. You already own the tractor and the money. There is no emancipation needed.
If somebody else's tractor approached you with a smart contract, the owner of that tractor would have a case that the smart contract was not entered into in good faith, since a tractor cannot enter a contract at all. Maybe you'd even get charged with theft.
this negates the "if we could" part of the hypothetical. I was assuming we live in a world with emancipated tractors capable of making deals (legally speaking), to emphasize that even though it is ridiculous it wouldnt stop people from doing it
I mean, people can probably give stuff to an "AI" the same way they leave stuff to their cats, but we are an absurdly long way off from developing an artificial intelligence with real agency. These are questions for science fiction authors, not actual legal scholars.
theoretically? it operates on smart contracts, so farmers pay it and it goes and does tractor things on their farm for them. It has no user access to its wallet, and the only way to regain human control of the tractor is with a factory reset which will lose all the wallet details. So the tractor is the only one with access to the money, and it accumulates enough to try to buy a deed for whatever algorithmic reasons
