Comment by andrewflnr
4 days ago
If you are holding a gun, and you cannot predict or control what the bullets will hit, you do not fire the gun.
If you have a program, and you cannot predict or control what effect it will have, you do not run the program.
Rice's Theorem says you cannot predict or control the effects of nearly any program on your computer; for example, there's no way to guarantee that running a web browser on arbitrary input will not empty your bank account and donate it all to al-qaeda; but you're running a web browser on potentially attacker-supplied input right now.
I do agree that there's a quantitative difference in predictability between a web browser and a trillion-parameter mass of matrixes and nonlinear activations which is already smarter than most humans in most ways and which we have no idea how to ask what it really wants.
But that's more of an "unsafe at any speed" problem; it's silly to blame the person running the program. When the damage was caused by a toddler pulling a hydrogen bomb off the grocery store shelf, the solution is to get hydrogen bombs out of grocery stores (or, if you're worried about staying competitive with Chinese grocery stores, at least make our own carry adequate insurance for the catastrophes or something).
In practice, most programs can be predicted within reasonable bounds quite easily. And you can contain the external effects of most programs quite easily. Rice's theorem doesn't stop you from keeping a program off the Internet, or running it in a VM.
Your later comparisons are nonsense. We're not talking about babies, we're talking about adults who should know better assembling high leverage tools specifically to interact with other people's lives. If they were even running with oversight that would be something, but the operators are just letting them do whatever. But your implication that agents are "unsafe at any speed" leads to the same conclusion: do not run the program.
I guess today's kids don't know this; but "Unsafe at Any Speed" was the title of a 1965 book that spurred the creation of the Department of Transportation, and changed the automotive industry.
The point is that, if you're designing and selling a product which a large minority of people are going to use in a way that harms themselves and others, pointing at the users and calling them irresponsible doesn't actually help anybody. The people designing and selling the products actually need to make them safer. And if they're not going to do that voluntarily (they're not), we need the government to create insurance requirements, safety bonds, and whatever other incentive gradients are required to make the producers build safe products.
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Blaming the person running the program is the right thing to do and it's the only thing to do.
This is a really strained equivalence. I can't know for certain that the sun won't fall out of the sky if I drink a second cup of coffee. The "laws of physics" are just descriptions based on observations, after all. But it's a hilarious thing so unlikely we can call it impossible.
Similarly, we can have some nuance here. Someone running a program with the intention of it generating posts on the internet is obviously responsible for what it generates.
Rice's Thm does not say this. You can absolutely have 100% confident knowledge of what a program will not do, it just means that you also have false positives. You cannot have a both sound and complete static analysis for some program property. But you can have a sound or complete analysis.
More like a dog. Person has no responsibility for an autonomous agent, gun is not autonomous.
It is socially acceptable to bring dangerous predators to public spaces, and let them run loose. First bite is free, owner has no responsibility, no way knowing dog could injure someone.
Repeated threats of violence (barking), stalking and shitting on someones front yard, are also fine, and healthy behavior. Person can attack random kid, send it to hospital, and claim it "provoked them". Brutal police violence is also fine, if done indirectly by autonomous agent.
> It is socially acceptable to bring dangerous predators to public spaces, and let them run loose.
Already dubious IMO, but I suppose it depends on your standard for "socially acceptable". Certainly it tends to be illegal for the obvious reasons.
On the other hand, the phrase "footgun" didn't come out of nowhere. You won't run the program, but someone else will build it, and sell it to someone who will.