They're really rushing to leave the bleakest cyberpunk distopia in the dust.
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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.
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.
I think he ment a human culpable for the actions of the company?
Which is strange since we don't hold executives accountable in any meaningful way.
Anything except banking
Quick add AI to your bittorrent clients, and take deposits for your crypto/gambling exchanges!
Isn't Delaware a famous tax haven?
Famous for hiding business owners and shielding them from legal consequences. I haven't heard about them being a tax haven; they just have a really thick corporate veil.
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.
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.
So financialization.
Rentseeking with extra steps.
More and more, alleged captains of industry are showing themselves to be confidence players who just defend capitalism because they got lucky in it.
The real scam was capitalism?
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.
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.
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
Don't forget the electric shock torture gloves that ICE recently ordered.
Now those can be widely deployed. They won't get a chance to lay hands on me without a firefight though.
This is absolutely guaranteed to happen. Companies already use insolvency law to avoid liability.
The legal fiction of the corporate shield is leading our species to its doom. Profit without accountability encourages destructive behavior.
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.
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.
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.
What do you mean by "corporate shield"? Are you referring to limited liability? Corporations are still accountable for the laws that they break.
I think they mean the corporate veil that is typically assumed, as in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piercing_the_corporate_veil
It provides a layer of liability protection for the personal assets of the humans behind the company when it comes to debts. But it also provides protection from criminal liability in many cases when it comes to horrible non-financial crimes.
Um, how? Corporations don't care if they go under. They also don't care if they commit genocide or are responsible for major industrial disasters.
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.
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.
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.
I.e. delware's rasion d'etre for decades anyway. A tax haven banana state with no identity beyond being the place people register businesses.
this technology will get a lot of people killed and it will only stop when it destroys enough elite families.
So nobody is responsible for a technology that runs all our digital systems....wtf fuck are we doing?
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.
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 🤷♂️
Hitmen would still be liable. Better to hire a swarm of drones or robodogs.
"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!"
Delaware Delamain.
Of course it's Delaware
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