Comment by DonsDiscountGas
10 hours ago
I half agree with you, but also when the machine swarm kills humanity it won't matter which specific corporate entity is considered responsible by the no-longer-enforceable human laws and non existent human courts.
So by all means sue them, but we can't just be reactive. We need regulation that prevents this type of thing from happening in the first place, not just regulations to help sue afterwards.
I feel like that's basically what they're trying to say; we should be using the legal system to punish them now to disincentivize us getting to the "machine swarm killing us all" stage.
I wonder if you could take an x-risk case to court and convince a judge and jury to award damages for harm that could have happened.
Is there any precedent for this? My hunch is that it's impossible in the US at least but who knows?
"Reckless endangerment" is a thing, but unfortunately I would expect trying to sue an AI company for it would be an uphill battle
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If you can prove that there’s an imminent threat, you can get an injunction.
Courts do not award damages for things that didn't happen.
Just FYI, regulations don't prevent murder.
There needs to be a technological solution.
I agree tech response is important here but like the deterrent effect of criminal prohibition on murder probably does prevent at least some murders.
Just call it war and it's no longer criminal. Perhaps on terror, or whatever.
If one is concerned with this sort of scenario, this talk about corporations and regulations is really short sighted.
Regulations do prevent murder, you just put consequences on doing murder to deter people from doing it.
Corporate Death Penalty absolutely would prevent future murders.
Just like the actual death penalty does, right?
Yes and you need to keep it simple too. AI should not have access to the internet.
It would be nice and clear to put into law too.
If you want to talk to it you walk up walk up to its keyboard and screen.
If Anthropic and Open AI want to sell us AI's they can ship us a box that lives in our offices.
> There needs to be a technological solution
You mean Minority Report?
I do think that regulations prevent some murders. I think lots of companies and some sociopathic individuals would be more likely to kill people, e.g. for profit, if it were legal.
We need both regulations and technical solutions.
This.
Also because when encountering a new socio-technical problem it is very non-trivial to determine which one of regulations or technical solutions are easier or more effective.
To even make a good guess you need to be an expert in both domains, which is extremely rare especially in this case.
Technically, they do already kill people for profit.
When some coked-out analyst in Manhattan projects what a company will be able to earn in profit in the next fiscal quarter, people listen to him and thus, the company must perform to that standard. Budgets are set accordingly.
If you have a maintenance backlog at a company facility, and that backlog includes things likely to cause injury or death to workers or the general public, that backlog must be handled in such a way as to satisfy that projection. If that means that you don't spend money to replace a series of gauges that alert operators as to overflow of a dangerous chemical, or don't hire enough people so that the operators are too fatigued to do their jobs safely, that's what that means.
The US CSB documents these as the cause of the 2005 BP Amoco Texas City disaster [0]
If you don't deliver the quarterly numbers expected, investors get mad, and in our current system and regulatory regime, that's worse than people being killed.
[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuJtdQOU_Z4
World is much more safer place now than in the entire history.
And sadly regulations wont happen until 2029 at the earliest, and only if democrats win majorities. That's simply the truth.
Not necessarily. The Trump administration slapping export controls on Fable, and then setting up a pre-launch review process, is a kind of regulation. A fairly aggro and controversial one, even.
If this administration actually becomes convinced that some imminent training run is likely to kill everyone, why wouldn't they act?
The key is winning the debate that ASI is species-cide by default.
We have to win it either way, because the 2028 US elections have little or nothing to do with what Xi does.
Was that what that was about? Not punishing anthropic for denying them their killbots? Because it sure seemed like it was about punishing an entity that denied them something.
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we must as i have now said too many times, prosecute the individual researchers and executives in a criminal court.
this is the only way to deter such activity. corporate fines are not enough. the charges are negligence, conspiracy and complicity.