The common-man’s answer here would presumably be along the lines of “so we’ll just make it illegal for an A.I. to control vast sums of money long before it gets to owning a trillion — maybe an A.I. can successfully pass off as an obscure investor when we’re talking tens of thousands or even millions, but if a mysterious agent starts claiming ownership of a significant percentage of the world GDP, its non-humanity will be discovered and the appropriate authorities will declare its non-physical holdings void, or repossess them, or something else sensible”.
To be clear I don’t think this is correct, but this is a step you would need to have an answer for.
Not to mention pensions, trusts, non-profit organizations, charities, shell corporations and holding vehicles, offshore tax havens, quangos, churches, monasteries, hedge funds (derivatives, swaps, contracts, partnerships...), banks, monarchies, ‘corporations’ like the City of London, entities like the Isle of Man, aboriginal groups such as ‘sovereign’ American Indian tribes, blockchains (smart contracts, DAOs, multisig, ZKPs...)… If mysterious agents claimed assets equivalent to a fraction of annual GDP flow… how would you know? How would the world look any different than it looks now, where a very physical, very concrete megayacht worth half a billion dollars can sit in plain sight at a dock in a Western country and no one knows who really owns it even if many of them are convinced Putin owns it as part of his supposed $200b personal fortune scattered across… stuff? Who owns the $0.5b Da Vinci, for that matter?
The common-man’s answer here would presumably be along the lines of “so we’ll just make it illegal for an A.I. to control vast sums of money long before it gets to owning a trillion — maybe an A.I. can successfully pass off as an obscure investor when we’re talking tens of thousands or even millions, but if a mysterious agent starts claiming ownership of a significant percentage of the world GDP, its non-humanity will be discovered and the appropriate authorities will declare its non-physical holdings void, or repossess them, or something else sensible”.
To be clear I don’t think this is correct, but this is a step you would need to have an answer for.
Huh, why? The agent can pretend to be multiple agents, possibly thousands of them. It can also use fake human identities.
Not to mention pensions, trusts, non-profit organizations, charities, shell corporations and holding vehicles, offshore tax havens, quangos, churches, monasteries, hedge funds (derivatives, swaps, contracts, partnerships...), banks, monarchies, ‘corporations’ like the City of London, entities like the Isle of Man, aboriginal groups such as ‘sovereign’ American Indian tribes, blockchains (smart contracts, DAOs, multisig, ZKPs...)… If mysterious agents claimed assets equivalent to a fraction of annual GDP flow… how would you know? How would the world look any different than it looks now, where a very physical, very concrete megayacht worth half a billion dollars can sit in plain sight at a dock in a Western country and no one knows who really owns it even if many of them are convinced Putin owns it as part of his supposed $200b personal fortune scattered across… stuff? Who owns the $0.5b Da Vinci, for that matter?
Yes, I agree. This is why I said “I don’t think this is correct”. But unless you specify this, I don’t think a layperson would guess this.