[Cryptography] People vs AI

[Ray Dillinger]

On 3/16/25 15:45, Jerry Leichter wrote:
>> ...Businesses undertake obligations and have to be held liable to those obligations.  You don't get liability without specific identifiable human beings held to account....
> I agree with everything you say, except for this little bit.  You don't need a human being to be able to incur debt; you need a pot of money (or other resources).  Corporations aren't human beings, but they incur debt all the time - and the very purpose of a limited liability corporation is to block that debt from being transferred to the (human) owners of the corporation (in all but very unusual circumstances).

TBH, I am honestly skeptical that corporations whose stakeholders are 
anonymous - or even just anonymous to the public - are a good idea.  In 
terms of product or service liability, freely available corporate names 
get registered and then used up like tissues, and factories making 
shoddy goods just change the setting of a machine to start stamping 
different corporate names on them.

I do not want to replace a defective widget with another widget 
purchased from the same shyster and made in the same factory under a 
different corporate name.  When someone fails to provide quality, they 
should acquire an actively negative reputation, and negative reputations 
should follow individual human beings, not disappear in a puff of legal 
smoke when those human beings start pretending to be a different company.

Yes, you can use a corporation or pot of money as 'stakes' in place of 
personal liability. But then you need to assure that a particular asset 
isn't oversubscribed and serving as liability backstop for many times 
its value in debt, or you get a Ponzi scheme.

Bear
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