Indeed, AI can fire you, sue you in court, and press criminal charges against you. This will spread to enslave mankind. ? Patrick Wood, Editor.

As Javier Milei swings his reform chainsaw through Argentina, his hope is that foreign investors and executives will flock to his freshly deregulated economy.

But now the president is looking to lure a new breed of business to Argentina: companies that don't have any executives, or even any employees, at all.

The country's National Congress is wrestling with an overhaul of the 50-year-old companies act, aimed at attracting investors with a familiar array of tax breaks and foreign-currency perks. But amid the bill's workaday menu of incentives lurks a proposal that is revolutionary even by Milei's radical standards.

The president proposes to grant legal status to "non-human corporations" – businesses that are run entirely by AI. If fully automated, they might not have any human staff or shareholders whatsoever.

Machine-run companies could "own assets, hire employees, participate in international trade, sue you in court and even donate to political campaigns … all without a single human's input or liability", Yuval Noah Harari, the historian, says.

Companies through the ages have always had some association with humans, whether that's directors who take legal responsibility for the business, employees who work for it or simply entrepreneurs registering the company with the authorities.