Uriel238 [all pronouns]

According to Wikipedia: Delaware charges no income tax on corporations not operating within the state, so taking advantage of Delaware’s other benefits does not result in taxation. At the same time, Delaware has a particularly aggressive tax on banks that locate in the state. However, in general, the state is viewed as a positive location for corporate tax purposes because favorable laws of incorporation allow companies to minimize corporate expenditures.

So, yeah, I was oversimplifying.

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Delaware is the state where a bunch of companies are legally but not physically headquartered, ro evade state taxes and regulations.

States need to rethink their tax laws for companies: If you do business here, you pay taxes here.

Um, how? Corporations don’t care if they go under. They also don’t care if they commit genocide or are responsible for major industrial disasters.

So financialization.

Rentseeking with extra steps.

More and more, alleged captains of industry are showing themselves to be confidence players who just defend capitalism because they got lucky in it.

This came up in my financial news feed. If you’re a publicly traded company you want to be a growth company and not a mature company. The latter group are stable and provide steady dividends. The former have shares that become more valuable and increase your worth.

This is how we get people pivoting from sparkling water to AI.

And it’s how we get software companies that have a solid product suddenly deciding to ruin it by adding AI.

All the current deaths by AI are chatbots inadvertently convinced a human being to kill themselves or others, through insufficiently-goverened use of chatbot services known for their hazardous sycophancy.

(Hazadous sycophancy is a phrase I never expected to read or type, and it raises concern about the yes-men populated environments the ultra-wealthy like to put themselves in, which rapidly deteriorates judgment and consideration of ethical principles. In the tech sector elite, pure ruthless disregard of human concerns is celebrated, and these are the folks leading the hyperscale LLM industry.)

It will be another thing entirely if ever an agentic AI chooses to deliberately social-engineer harm. Two scenarios from fiction come to mind.

The first is in The Silence of the Lambs in which Hannibal Lecter deliberately talks Multiple Miggs (in the adjacent cell) to commit suicide over the course of a night.

The other is the opening of the X-Files episode Kill Switch in which a hacker in a diner is trying to access files of an AI system, which then calls a number of drug dealers to the restaurant, and then some US Marshalls. The hacker dies in the ensuing firefight.

Yeah, there’s a next level when an agentic AI intentionally decides to neutralize someone who is an obstruction to their goal. And it might be another category still when someone commands an agent to remove a target, and they comply.

The second category might already been met if there are autonomous weapons that can track a target in a more sophisticated process than guided missiles, say a dog-bomb bot that tracks enemy units on the ground. I wonder if we yet have agentic AI that commands other units to coordinate an attack or sweep and clear territory.

We haven’t yet seen an autonomous car kill someone (there was one incident involving a car that wasn’t supposed to be fully autonomous, so it can be attributed to driver neglect.)

I’ve also expected someone to assassinate someone else by hacking an internet-of-things medical device attached to a vulnerable patient (say a morphine feed), but that hasn’t happened to my knowledge either.

They’re discovering that this iteration of robots are way more expensive than human beings. Even well-paid, well-benefitted human beings. Data centers burn through a lot of expensive microchips quickly, and that cost is passed downstream to compute costs.

The hyperscalers are way under-charging for tokens and are hemorrhaging money, even as they borrow more for the data center buildout.

(I anticipate this desperation is what is driving the shenanigans and foul play regarding permitting and environment maintenence issues driving districts to moratorium buildout in their area. athe finance sector is notorious for overplaying their valuation and then turning to crime when they’ve borrowed over their head.)

Maybe as a society, we’ll learn to treat financial fraud as severe as it is, instead of deciding it’s too complicated to govern.

It turns out other businesses don’t like agentic LLM models either, when they are on the subject side of them rather than the client side.

We had a similar problem in the 2010s (maybe sooner?) that could automatically buy and sell stocks at set prices, leading to flash selloffs and resulting stock crashes.

So banks are disallowing agentic access to accounts and penalizing customers who give their access credentials to LLM agents, or have their agents harass customer service. I expect court proceedings will soon follow to determine who is responsible when agentic software becomes a public nuisance or commits a crime. (That is, commits a crime extreme enough to provoke the justice system.)

Since agents are unrestrained in pursuit of the goals they are prompted to chase, they’ve clashed harshly with human powered systems when they regard those systems like a force of nature. We may be creeping up on the first time an agent encounters an obstacle and escalates to force and deception. Watch for the first agent-filed lawsuit. Or the first agentic social engineering. Or the first agent-provoked SWATting.

In a better, more socially collaborative society, safeguards on agentic LLMs would be a priority to train them to behave appropriately in human intercourse. (All the stuff we’re trained in kindergarten.)

But IRL, in our world, bad faith engagement is the norm, and so agentic AI will soon be used as a weapon.

To date, I think, a robot has not killed anyone. Nor, I think, has anyone used a robot to kill someone else. Those firsts might be imminent.

Kinda like billionaires with their apocalypse shelters. If they had any self-awareness, they could just stop and maybe invest in mitigation and prevention of certain catastrophic scenarios.

But no matter how rich they are, they just want more and can’t help themselves.

Banks and businesses are not self-aware either.

It would not be legal in a society that is actually trying to have consistent laws. The US is not one of those.

At this point businesses don’t have to adhere to any regulations so long as they bribe the officials that are supposed to enforce them.