Comment by jMyles
7 hours ago
The author addresses this point as well:
> This is also why we do not believe PICK becomes less useful as models improve. Better models do not make user intent more articulate — asked for “a regex matching countries of North America”, a more capable model still cannot tell you whether you want the Caribbean included, or where you want to stop heading south. Better models produce better candidates, faster — which shifts user effort precisely toward the work PICK is built to support.
That's not I'm saying tho. I quoted the "non-participation in war" bit. I don't see how any system can ascertain if a prompt asking for an algorithm is dual use or not.
Well, taking the example in the article about a formal verification to determine whether a regex is for a collection of phone numbers or countries, and if a country is specified as "America", to formally verify whether that means North America or all Americas including the Caribbean:
A regex which "properly" determines this in a witness/formal verification model is subject to the same sorts of political distinctions and nuances, right down to subjective interpretation of which nation-states are legitimate, etc, that participation in warfare/predation/injustice are.
If the USA says that Cuba is part of the USA, and the rest of the Western Hemisphere says it's not, then the formal verification is necessarily matching the prompt intention to a social and political milieu, which, while subjective, is still cognizable and subject to introspection and, in some cases, a type of consensus.
It seems similarly possible to formally verify that results do or do not meet similar subjective-but-cognizable criteria: does the result trigger engagement of weapons systems? Does it they implicate borders in a way that diminishes the sovereignty of a people? (which, like the regex example, have subjective but cognizable nuances)? Does the result serve to enrich (a perhaps pre-supplied) list of criminals/cartels/contractors/war profiteers? All of these seem like similar problems to the regex example.
I don't disagree with your high-level contention that powerful dual-use technology can always cut through the good and evil in each of us. But I think that's precisely the point of searching for formally-verifiable spec-elucidation. If it were obvious from the outset whether or not a particular word represents the same of a nation-state widely regarded as sovereign, or whether an action was or was not an act of war, then we'd not need AI (let alone formal verification of a prompt-result match) in the first place.