Reid Hoffman: prediction

Transcript context

…You die intestate. The company goes bankrupt, you give it away, it comes from Estonia, you can’t trace it, something’s encrypted. It just seems to me there’ll be a lot of bots that’ll reproduce for Darwinian reasons, and we have to face questions about them, even if we’d like to ban them. I do think raising the question is good. I’m not trying to resist the question. What I am saying is, I think that developers — look, you can hash it with Bitcoin — they can earn money, run things themselves. I think there are various ways that you could get a self-perpetuating bot process, even on today’s bots, which aren’t really creatures. They’re more tools. You could set up the tool to do that. Totally doable. What I am saying is, we as a human society, human tribe, shouldn’t necessarily ascribe any legal rights to that. We shouldn’t necessarily allow autonomous bots functioning because that would be something that currently has uncertain safety factors. I’m not going to the existential risk thing, just cyber hacking and other kinds of things. Yes, it’s totally technically doable, but we should venture into that space with some care. What we want is to tax their income. Otherwise, they’re arbitraging against labor, which might pay 40 percent tax. The bot pays nothing. It’s not a legal entity. You’d rather legalize it, tax it, regulate it. Some government will do that, even if ours doesn’t.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.