What I’m really looking forward to is when autonomous taxis can run a net profit —- including maintenance and upgrades —- at which point, instead of letting Waymo take all the vehicle profit in the world, I want to start an autonomous taxi company and then find an appropriate legal construction/shenanigan to give ownership of the company to the cars! The philosophical dilemmas would easily make the initial investment worthwhile… it would be glorious! An ever-expanding autonomous taxi company that just plows profits back into expansion, and then contracts programmers to improve the software, lawyers to defend its existence, and maybe even business consultants to suggest R&D or expansion ideas…
> at which point, instead of letting Waymo take all the vehicle profit in the world, I want to start an autonomous taxi company
How do you plan to do that? Will you wrestle the code away from Waymo? Or do you plan to put in the long years of thousands of man hours to develop it and all the costs of the hardware while you do it?
Wow thanks for the entry to a rabbit hole on what is a legal person. Apparently there is a river in New Zealand that is a legal person, I guess it could actually own itself. Does not seem possible in the US outside of folklore
Glossing over the part where you try to tell a judge a company should be owned by its assets, why do you think the 'autonomous' in autonomous cars means they would also be able to do hiring, planning, assign work etc?
I'm guilty of thoughts about autonomous companies. They don't require AI necessarily, just a formula to hire reliable humans. One could short cut to the gedankenexperiment by assuming the company owner is a p-zombie[0]. It would boil down to the same thing without scaring the humans. Even the judge would have to accept it.
The self-owned car company idea is fighting in my "list of short stories I'd write if I had the skill and got off my ass and did it" with a variant where the company is formed in middle ages Europe, and driven (at least at first) by written policy, in exactly that way.
There would be a legal firm to handle direct tasks, and vetting contractors, then an auditing legal firm. A CEO-type, and various checks/fail-safes.
Periodically hire competent groups to come up with new ideas and have a policy for updating the policy.
One of the "ideas" people would eventually realize the need for failsafes for the failsafes: taking control of the entity's assets would become extremely profitable. So you need some kind of secret society to keep an eye on things and execute the assassinate-and-reset plan when necessary.
Naturally its influence would need to turn malign, after it was too powerful for anyone to stop it…
Your taxi company should start in the middle ages and gradually develop for 1500 years.
A friend from Türkiye told me in his village they take turns taking everyone's cows to pasture every morning and back home at the end of the day. Some homes are abandoned, people died, the gates are open, the cows still living there just join the heard and go back home at the end of the day.
Horses or dogs should be able to learn to walk from A to B if they get food there. If you don't pay them they should eventually refuse (specially if it is you again) and require some payment in advance. Younglings can be tied to the cart. I think they will know their route eventually.
You could even have a Musk like figure promising it will work next year for the first few decades.
While I am not taking the proposal particularly seriously, I think it's fair to say that we have something close to a model for a company being owned by its assets in law and other professional partnerships.
If companies can do stock buybacks, they theoretically can buy back 100% of the stock, giving ownership of the company to itself, basically its own assets ? I dont see the problem.
A company that buys back all of its stock is treated as liquidating.
Nor is it possible in the West for two companies to own 100% of each other's shares (i.e., circular ownership). In most of the West, a subsidiary acquiring its parent's stock is treated as a redemption of those shares (i.e., as if those shares were returned to the parent), assuming the transaction is even allowed.
You don't see the problem but after companies repurchase shares the company is always owned by the remaining shareholders - who essentially always own 100% of the stock.
The argument I can imagine is already around (like for many potential AI applications): even if you know the law, such as if you are a lawyer, you always get representation because judges and jurors are prejudiced to rate self-representing participants worse.
I can easily imagine the same (unprincipled) dynamic applying to an AI lawyer.
I think you'll find it difficult, given the general attitude the legal system has had to AI anything: lots of things are defined to require a human (see the various attempts to assign copyright or patents to AIs).
Thinking about this dispelled my last bit of youthful naivete a few years ago.
Won't it be great once we have fully self-driving cars? Heck, I could buy a car and then rent it out to other people like a taxi when I'm not using it, and it would pay for itself. Maybe I could even make a profit!
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If I could make more money than the car costs to purchase and maintain, without any additional work on my part, why would the company sell me the car at that price in the first place rather than just running the taxi service themselves and keeping all of that extra profit?
