With A.I., for the first time in history, we have a practical potential for companies without humans. You can have millions, even billions of A.I.s opening their own companies, their own bank accounts, even hiring people to work for them. And they will have huge advantages over of human companies. For instance, the A.I. C.E.O. never sleeps. The A.I. C.E.O. never goes on vacation. And some countries, I can imagine — say, a country like Qatar, which has a lot of money, a lot of energy and very few citizens — saying, oh, wonderful, I can now have millions of A.I. citizens paying taxes and building companies that trade and do business all over the world. So even if your country doesn’t allow A.I.s to build their own companies, what do you do about the Qatari A.I. companies? And the moment you recognize A.I.s as legal persons, this is the moment you really lose control, because then they can start doing a lot of things in the economic and social and political arena without any human accountability, including, for instance, to donate money to politicians in exchange for the politicians taking care of giving more rights to A.I. persons.
