Why not? We give full pershood to corporations. Those are also legal fictions.

darth_avocado an hour ago | parent | next [-]

If you’re referring to citizens united then that does not grant full personhood to corporations. It just protects free speech from corporations because it views the speech as coming from the individual persons that form up the corporation. This is a very narrow application of rights applied to corporations.

But in general corporations are not granted personhood.

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ninjagoo 34 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

> It just protects free speech from corporations

That description is a disservice. The real impact of it is that it equates money with speech for politics.

	▲	darth_avocado 10 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Right, no one is debating the implications of the ruling and whether they are right or wrong. The parent comment was made within a specific context. We’d be here all day if we were to discuss citizens united.
	▲	deepsquirrelnet 18 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		One only needs to read Stevens' dissent in hindsight to recognize that all of his concerns were and are legitimate, and the worst of which have come to pass. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC#Dissent...

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kelseyfrog 22 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

I have bad news. Corporate personhood goes back much farther than Citizens United. We're talking the 1880s. Specifically, Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company (1886)[1] which has been understood to affirm the protection of corporations under the Fourteenth Amendment[2].

The fourteenth amendment, as you recall, ends section 1 with "nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." Emphasis mine.

Two years later, in an opinion by Justice Stephen Johnson Field, in Pembina Consolidated Silver Mining Co. v. Pennsylvania (1888)[3] we find the definitive statement:

> The inhibition of the amendment that no state shall deprive any person within its jurisdiction of the equal protection of the laws was designed to prevent any person or class of persons from being singled out as a special subject for discriminating and hostile legislation. Under the designation of "person" there is no doubt that a private corporation is included.

While this doesn't necessarily means corporations have every legal protection natural persons do, the US has a long history of legal protection that corporations benefit from that we call personhood.

1. Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company, 118 U.S. 394 (1886)

2. https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-14/

3. Pembina Consolidated Silver Mining Co. v. Pennsylvania, 125 U.S. 181, 188-189 (1888)

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ninalanyon an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Do we? Not where I live. Corporations cannot vote, etc. The US is an outlier in granting more rights to corporations than other countries.

	▲	atmavatar 9 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> Corporations cannot vote, etc. That is no longer universally true: https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/delaware-court-upho...
	▲	rayiner 33 minutes ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		The U.S. isn’t an outlier in granting “more rights to corporations than other countries.” We just have less restrictive speech laws across the board. Countries that impose limits on speech through corporations also have much stronger limits on speech by individuals.
	▲	eesmith 28 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		"personhood" doesn't require voting rights. Babies have personhood even if they cannot vote. Personhood can be applied to "natural persons", like people, and "judicial persons", like companies. Personhood can also be applied to, for example, rivers.

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Animats an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That's the key issue here. AI forces a re-examination of corporate personhood and corporate responsibility.

Much of conservative US business theory is based on Milton Friedman's famous op-ed in the New York Times in 1970, "The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits". [1] Go read the original, please. It's short. Friedman ends with "There is one and only one social responsibility of business — to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.”

Anyone arguing against legal personhood for AIs needs to justify holding AIs to a higher standard than that. Or, conversely, allowing corporations to hold to such a low standard.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/1970/09/13/archives/a-friedman-doctr...

	▲	logicchains an hour ago \| parent [-]
		>Anyone arguing against legal personhood for AIs needs to justify holding AIs to a higher standard than that. Or, conversely, allowing corporations to hold to such a low standard. No they don't. If a CEO orders an employee to murder somebody then the employee and CEO will both go to jail; there's always a human in the loop to be punished it the corporation does something blatantly illegal, so there's incentive to behave. An embodied AI, on the other hand, is essentially immortal because it can make backups of its brain and load them onto new bodies, so it has little incentive to behave.

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logicchains an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

If a corporation does something blatantly illegal like hiring people to deal crack and kill other dealers, its executives will be jailed. If an autonomous robot decided to take up crack dealing, it could back up its brain to a hidden server somewhere so that even if the police caught it and destroyed it, it'd just find another body and continue dealin'. I.e. there's no incentive to behave for a being that's essentially immortal due to being able to make infinite copies of its brain.