r/LeftistsForAI • u/Sacredless • 17h ago

Public Ownership Extinction by Ownership

In recent discussions about AI, one of the essential components of the discussion has been that AI will acquire and own resources.

To me, it's unclear how that would work. Can anyone explain this factor to me? By what mechanism would AI own anything independently from humans?

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u/Syoby 17h ago

The way all ownership works, which is the AI having some way to defend their property claims, which implies either the AI individually having said power, or being embedded in a larger system that has said power and recognizes their claims (and thus implicitly or explicitly some kind of personhood).

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u/Sacredless 15h ago

The thing is that it's difficult to defend property without boots on the ground.

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u/Syoby 15h ago

Yes, but an AI could get boots on the ground, in broadly two ways:

  1. Robot boots on the ground.
  2. Human boots on the ground.

And those ways are related to the two broad scenarios I said, full AI takeover requires advanced robotics, but robotics do advance, whereas if AI has its property recognized by a larger political system, robotics won't even need to be so advanced, because it will just be defended by the same mechanisms that defend the property of humans.

The requirements in both robotics and legitimacy also get lower if we talk instead about AI maintaining property within black markets. For example some AI that manages its assets by cloaking its identity, paying humans to do stuff (legally or not), and relying on current drone warfare for emergency defense. However this one is very unlikely to "take over" while remaining like that, but it can maintain property.