Image used without permission from The Microbial World.
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
An Odd Thought
Sometimes eccentric people bequeath their fortunes to their pets. I wonder if you could leave your money to a pool of single-celled algae. What do you suppose the court would do? They'd have to appoint a caretaker to the pool. Would they find a local biologist from a university to oversee the pool? Hmmm.
All through my life, they were the only ones I could trust.
Image used without permission from The Microbial World.
Image used without permission from The Microbial World.
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5 comments:
I'm concerned that the 3 on the left are excluding the one on the right. They might be plotting.
Why do wills cause so much ill will between algae?
This leads kind of tangentially to something I've been wondering about:
Let's say you own a business making widgets, and it is set up as a corporation. It turns out that widgets lend themselves to being automatically produced, so as time goes by you progressively replace your human workers with machines, which are sufficiently robust and reliable that you are the only person actually needed.
You then install a fully automated system to handle interactions with the outside world (billing suppliers, arranging for shipping, paying utilities, etc.) and set it up so that everything runs on its own. So now, all you are doing is receiving parts and doing maintenance on the machines.
Finally, self-repairing maintenance robots come on the market, so you buy and install them. Leaving you with nothing to do. So you go home, set up the company accounts so that it can automatically look after itself without you needing to review or sign anything, and use your income from the company to buy up all the outstanding stock so that you are the sole owner of the corporation.
Then, in your will you leave everything to your corporation. You die, and the corporation keeps chugging along, doing its deals and selling its goods and fixing its breakdowns and managing its accounts. And it retains a law firm to look after its legal interests.
Would that work in the long term? With our present legal structures, could such a non-human entity persist for more than a couple of months? Or would there have to be some living human stockholders in order for the courts to take it seriously as a legal entity?
Tim, I would think that it would break down the first time a business decision needed to be made. What would happen if a supplier went out of business or wanted to renegotiate prices?
Really, the only ones you can truly trust are the algae. Give in to the single celled green lifestyle.
Well, I was assuming that you could make the automated systems good enough that it could actually handle things like taking bids from new suppliers, and could avoid getting driven out of business due to inflexible business practices in less than, say, a decade. And, if it could hire consultants to do software upgrades and such, maybe it could manage to be flexible enough to survive.
Given that, though, would it have any legal protection against customers simply refusing to pay, vendors violating contracts, and simple robbers breaking into the place and stealing everything that could be moved? Or would the courts automatically treat it as abandoned, ownerless property, and all contracts as contracts with a dead man, and not with the actual corporation?
IANAL, but I would imagine that the corporation would need a board of directors, or at the very least a governing director, who would need to be a human.
Best way to achieve that is to form a trust, have that hold all the shares and have the trustee(s) as the director(s).
The law firm you mentioned could fulfil any of those requirements for you.
Only question you need ask is "Where can I find an honest lawyer?" Solve that one and you should be set.
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