What if the human couldn't reasonably know better? Doesn't matter - If they made the same decision without AI or with old files it is still on them.
What if there's no single human decision? Someone is in charge and is responsible. The "I was ordered to" isn't a defense.
Does liability without power make sense? People executing have the power to execute. So liability. If they're executing without power that is a different liability, but a liability.
It may let the powerful off the hook - That is already a theme and AI doesn't change that, in fact, it will just be used as another scapegoat.
Let's say I start an AI program and my initial prompt is "Copy these files to this other computer", and then 100 iterations down the agentic loop the AI decides to hack into Tesla's FSD and ships an update that kills 500 people.
Obviously this is up to courts and juries to hammer out but...
- Your agentic loop hacked something? You're liable.
- FSD crashes? The guy in the driver's seat is liable. He/his insurance can sue Tesla to spread the liability...
Nowhere along the line will anyone go "Oh, the AI did it... whoops"
I'm not aware of any counter-example, but I also don't know any reason why this must be true. And furthermore, I would expect that this will get more likely over time.
It's possible, in theory, that an AI could establish a crypto wallet, but what would they do with it? AI doesn't have desires. It doesn't do what it isn't told to do (although those instructions can be broad and vague). Even if an AI did somehow do something bad without being told, that AI would still be set up by a human and running on some human's hardware and using a human's internet connection.
Maybe in the distant sci-fi future we'll have actual AI (not just glorified chatbots) and AI will be able to decide for itself what it wants to do with its time and we'll be allowing AI to sign leases on property and set up accounts with utility companies, and if that day comes we're going to have a lot of problems if we're not ready for it, but until then it's AI on a human's hardware at a human's property running up a human's electric bill.
I think it's just a gap in definitions. The labs say models don't act on their own initiative. What counts as initiative? I guess an API call in a for loop would count.
Historically it seems like a lot of laws haven't been easy to change. Especially when they regulate zillion dollar industries.
> Martin Bormann issued a circular (the "normal type decree") to all public offices which declared Fraktur (and its corollary, the Sütterlin-based handwriting) to be Judenlettern (Jewish letters) and prohibited their further use.
I don't know if you meant to invoke pro/anti-Nazi associations with this typeface but it's unfortunate that such a fantastic lettering style carries around a poisonous historical connotation.
I am aware (of the Judenlettern decree). The reference to exactly this was intentional.
(Edit to make this really obvious: The joke here is that "fraktur = nazis" became such a meme that the nazis themselves were annoyed by it and forbade its use, but this is exactly the kind of thing the present administration would either be unaware of or simply ignore and then use fraktur intentionally to pander to neo-nazis.)
Thanks for spelling it out. I had a feeling that's the point you were making, but that level of subtlety has a hard time getting through, even on highbrow hn. Hence I like to err on the side of spelling things out, especially since I'm much more often a reader than a writer.
Fraktur would be apt as the oldest existing typeface. This administration and its supporters are so backward, it makes the 1600s look like mega-liberal ultra-modern science fiction. I’m just waiting for an executive order reintroducing cuneiform.
Not sure why you are getting downvoted. Dropping Calibri was done precisely because it was associated with a reason like this, so you're entirely right.
Just build a bunch of nuclear power plants around the world. If we can spend a trillion or two bombing the taliban back into power we can afford some energy projects.
Nuclear power plants are expensive and take time to build, though. At the moment we're still burning way too much oil and coal for our energy, and everything that drives up demand, contributes to that.
We had it 40 years and we will have it the next N-Thousand years because of the waste they produce.
Also, Nuclear-Power was massive subvention by the gov. Actually a business-case that can not exist without subvention. So we all paid it with the taxes and we still pay because of the nuclear-wast.
The idea to build new nuclear-plants, is a new subvention-scam by some lobbyists or tech-giants who want to pass on their costs to the general public.
The reality is a deep geological repository[1] for high radioactive waste. And this is also necessary for reprocessing [2]. Reprocessing will only reduce the high level waste.
I don't remember anyone complaining about it taking too long, 40 years ago. People were worried about Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, about what to do with the waste, about leakage. But not about time.
But whatever the causes, too little has been done over those 40 years, and at the moment, solar is far cheaper and faster to deploy than nuclear. I'm not stopping anyone from building nuclear power plants, but I think its window has gone. It's too expensive and too slow. But feel free to prove me wrong.
so the tradeoff, for having to have both parents working for a very average family, is that they can surf the Internet and get Doordash? you come on. I'm not denying that we have a better quality of living today, but how much time do you have outside of weekends to just go fishing or whatever? all these labor saving devices were supposed to give us more leisure time but instead we're worrying harder than ever!
I was going to say this typo was accurate, but now I realise I've never actually seen a detailed analysis of how much people worried in the past, just confident claims it was so.
haha good catch. we've only been tracking happiness since 2012, with Finland in the lead, though worry isn't the opposite of happiness, it would be fascinating to be able to have a global tally of how humans are feeling.
When was this chill time when we could just take off fishing for a week or two?
Random breakdown of time :)
* 1800s
* 1900-WW1
* WW1-WW2
* WW2-1980
* 1980-Now
And yeah, single breadwinner households were a thing back in the day it was generally because women didn't have a choice at all.
I'm pretty sure you have more options and choice today as to how you want to live your life, but if you want a family you gotta feed the little bastards one way or another, that has always been a "worry".
The human making the decision is always liable.
What if the human couldn't reasonably know better? Doesn't matter - If they made the same decision without AI or with old files it is still on them.
What if there's no single human decision? Someone is in charge and is responsible. The "I was ordered to" isn't a defense.
Does liability without power make sense? People executing have the power to execute. So liability. If they're executing without power that is a different liability, but a liability.
It may let the powerful off the hook - That is already a theme and AI doesn't change that, in fact, it will just be used as another scapegoat.
God told me to do it - Water tight! Right?
reply