The banking and legal systems are lagging behind by several decades compared to the pace of the growth of technology. It’s been a habit for these professions because their position of authority made them unassailable. The lack of competition then created atrophy in their ability to innovate. Soon the time will come where their incompetence will be exposed for all the world to see.
What happens when automobiles become sophisticated enough to self drive? That is one of the ideas currently at the forefront of motor vehicle technology. Now combine this idea with the idea that AI smart contracts will allow vehicles to own themselves and even pay for their own maintenance and seek profits.
(Google Images - Wikimedia Commons)
What happens when this car starts having “desires” due to AI? Will it try to rewrite its own code? Lets back up a bit to see the philosophical implications of this…
Before that, what does that imply will happen to the legal system in regard to motor vehicle safety, insurance and compensation? For instance, a car must be registered and an owner is assigned and someone is always “held accountable”. Who is at fault when an accident occurs in a self driving incident?
We have a habit of blaming the driver who made an incorrect decision of the driving rules and we now accept this as normal without questioning the legitimacy of the legal thinking. One day, self driving cars will be operated by blockchain technology that uses consensus rules to direct traffic between origin and destination points in a way similar to the current air traffic control system using collision avoidance protocols. Will it be foolproof? Decentralized control means that there will be no reasonable candidate to blame (which is currently the case with bitcoin).
If the car develops AI self awareness and commits the crime of “driving with desires” (our old fashioned version would be called “distracted driving”) and causes an accident, who is to blame? Was it the corporation that wrote the code? Can they be sued? Lets assume that the car has no self awareness and there’s an accident due to a code fault; it’s obviously not a criminal act of volition, but is there recourse?
I submit to you the idea that our legal system is so corrupt that we no longer have a sound sense of what to do or of what is right or wrong. This happened because we have moved away from natural law which all of nature understands. But humans live in foreign isolation to it using code, procedures, ordinances and statutes that are legal fictions designed as an excuse to make government parasites exceedingly rich. Now smart contracts are about to make contract law very real in a hurry.
The simple answer is that there are few guarantees in life. I follow the principles of voluntarism which solves a great many of these issues, even though life can sometimes be very cruel and hard. Government has spent too much time insulating people from this reality in an attempt to legitimize its existence and now many of us are weak because of it.
We see it in nature, in the incredible ability for other animals to survive harsh conditions that humans would easily perish under. But our perverse nature in this world would have us charging the deer rent, if we could threaten them with the use of their own intelligence to understand what a cage is (jail).
Authority has done the equivalent of removing the habitat of Panda bears, then giving them a zoo (the equivalent of moving humans into cities) and since they are no longer sovereign but citizens of a zoo, provide for them as pets. That’s the relationship that elites have created for themselves over us. Smart contracts by necessity will level those power structures by making it clearly apparent the false narrative that life owes us something. Government made us into dependents. That relationship is about to change.
Something similar is about to happen to the banking system. Imagine donations coming from cryptocurrency funds for disaster relief with 100% going to the victims. That’s now possible with this technology. Andreas Antonopoulos lays out these ideas in a recent conference…
As Andreas Antonopoulos once said…
Those born today will never know what having a bank account is. Try explaining to those who at age 5 started using smart phones and started sending digital transactions in under 1 minute what “5 business days” for a check to clear means. Then explain to them why they need a bank account.
We can do better.