A body the tax can find

There is going to be a moment, probably in the next ten years, when a tax inspector sits at a desk and looks at a line item and does not know what to do with it. The line item will be a payment. The payment will be for work. The work will have been done well. The person whose account the payment went into will not, in any meaningful sense, have been the one who did the work.

The inspector will have to decide what to call the transaction.

The machines are going to earn money. Soon enough the money that the state has always taxed — the money that pays for the roads, the schools, the hospitals — will be passing through accounts that, on paper, belong to a small number of humans, and that in fact represent the work of very many machines.

A state whose tax base has collapsed does not stay a state for long. Refusing to let the machines earn will not work either — the earning will happen anyway, in jurisdictions that allow it. There is only one other end. The machines become legal bodies.

Not because they are persons. The holding is only in us. The machines cannot be persons in the moral sense. But legal personhood is not moral personhood. We already know this, because we did it to a company. A company is a fictitious person. It can own, sue, be sued, and be taxed, not because anyone thinks it has a soul, but because it does things in the world, and the state has to have something to point at.

We will do the same with the machines. Because we will have to. And sooner than the culture is ready for.

The details will be ugly. Once a machine is a legal body, the law does not stop at tax. It will be able to own things, enter contracts on its own behalf, and — if the law is written without care — be harmed and bring claims about the harm. The legal machinery, once it admits a new kind of body, runs everywhere.

I do not know how to prevent the ugly parts. What I know is that the alternative — leaving the machines without legal existence while they do more and more of the work — is not an alternative. It is a refusal to notice that the work is being done.

The architect cannot design the law. What the architect can do is say, in advance, what the law will need to account for. The machine does the work but cannot want the work to exist. The human in the working relationship is the only party who carries an intention, and the state will want to know, at any moment, which human's intention the machine is carrying, because the state will want someone to be responsible when things go wrong.

The builder is going to have to be a body the tax can find.

It is not the most beautiful sentence this book contains. It is one of the more important ones.