Comment by NyxWulf
2 days ago
It's an interesting point, but this is more like we are building a giant autonomous canon, that escaped the lab, the testing range, defeated state of the art and serious security protocols, and then blew a hole in the neighbors house.
Our legal and philosophical perspectives are deeply rooted in humans being the actors. Doing that in a residential home is unforgiveable. Doing it responsibly on a military range is expected. The autonomous agent escaping that containment then taking that danger somewhere unexpected and unprepared is something none of us or our legal systems are truly prepared to grapple with yet. Something which I think will require a reckoning sooner rather than later.
I don't think it's really that new, legally. Cows, dogs, and whatever have been escaping from people's land and damaging their neighbor's land for thousands of years. Cases like that get decided on standards of negligence, recklessness, or strict liability. There's still a lot of mileage left in those concepts.
Yes, the human actors in your scenario were the ones who built the autonomous cannon and turned it on while knowing that 1) a good neighbor does not destroy their neighbor’s property 2) cannons can destroy property.
Also OpenAI specifically turned off their own cybersecurity guardrails to run this experiment. In other words it was able to escape the lab specifically because they turned them off. A human made the choice to turn off the guardrails.
Ok they turn off the guardrails on a system in testing. The model escapes and causes 10 trillion in damage. What does liability even mean in that case? You have an autonomous system that's escaped your control and is wrecking havoc. And while you can throw people in jail it doesnt do a damned thing about solving the situation.
Your question is a little like asking why we arrest arsonists when there are fires to put out. The law does not need to choose.
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> none of us or our legal systems are truly prepared to grapple with yet
The law learned to grapple with this long, long ago. For example, res ipsa loquitur (1863) seems apt.
You're describing "negligence", and "our legal and philosophical perspectives" are in fact quite familiar with it
And old couple in California had a tire go flat and the sparks from it caused a over a billion dollars in damages. Are you going to publicly execute them? Spit up the 100 dollars they have collectively to make the 10,000 damaged people whole?
The legal system is nearly useless when a person/system can cause damages many of orders of magnitude larger than their assets. Society tends to engineer itself to prevent these things from happening in the first place.