Comment by roncesvalles
17 days ago
It's not so much that it can't make a decision, but that whoever allowed it to make decisions is ultimately responsible for them.
Decision laundering is a great term. There is ultimately a human who gave the program free rein. You can't say "sorry my car hit you, it's not my fault" especially when the person driving works for the car manufacturer too.
> It's not so much that it can't make a decision, but that whoever allowed it to make decisions is ultimately responsible for them.
This. I agree 100%.
Computers make decisions all the time, and have been doing so for decades. But we still keep the human behind the computer accountable.
I know this has to be the case but it’s scary since most of what agents do can be a black box.
It doesn’t matter what kind of box an agent is if the people using it don’t let you know how the decisions was made.
Except now there's no longer any guarantees there's even any people you can point at. It's already often diffuse responsbilitiy. Maybe today you can still sort of get around that by pointing at business/organization owners. But soon we're going to see situations where that isn't even realistic. For example if AI agents start spinning up their own agents which work outside of the control of anyone. We're going to need some way to deal with that.
Agents run on computers, those computers have owners. We have to maintain accountability and not let people who stand to get rich from privatizing the profits but socializing the risk of rogue agents from continuing to push a narrative of autonomous super intelligence that is “too powerful” to control.
That narrative is bullshit. Intelligence is not power. The power comes from hooking these agents up to everything without proper safety controls. The fact that those safety controls don’t exist yet is not humanity’s problem, it’s the frontier labs problem, and we can’t let them wriggle out of it with an Overton window shift or demanding that the government take responsibility via regulation (of course they should but it doesn’t absolve the labs of responsibility for their own actions).
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> It's already often diffuse responsbilitiy.
yeah that's BS and the issue is that people actually believe that. the responsible party is whoever is running the ai agent.
Why would that need a new way? Or do you mean that no-one ever spun up anything at all (e.g., agent zero was never spun up or allowed to be spun up by anyone)?
> Except now there's no longer any guarantees there's even any people you can point at.
Really ? See VW diesel scandal. When there's a will...
I know this topic and thinking will evolve.
When someone hands the reins to an agent or group of agents, the agent(s) have free rein to do things, including things not directly intended by the owner.
If a person has a child, and their child does something bad, there is some mixed responsibility there. It’s a spectrum from age 0 to 18, where 0 is 100% parent responsibility and 18 is 100% child’s (legal adult’s) responsibility
As long as agents are unpredictable and highly capable, this will be a blurry line to draw.
Human user argues to the court with prompt evidence that they never told the agent to hack that company or dump that sensitive data online. The agent “decided” those actions were in service of the prompt but here’s a plethora of perfectly suitable alternative paths it could have taken instead. If I’d paid a human to complete the task, and they broke the law in the process, the onus is on them, not me, as I didn’t instruct them directly or indirectly to perform those specific actions.
It will be a murky legal mess. Though I’m sure it will provide fascinating legal arguments and judicial opinions in the decade to come.
What about a company that’s got an AI workflow and their client initiates some workflow that their AI agents carry out and inadvertently break the law. Is the company responsible because they own the agents? The org upstream that licensed the AI to the company, or the user who may not have even known AI was involved on the back end?
If the legal decisions are that AI are not humans and the human prompter is responsible even if they didn’t instruct or intend said action, well, then any sane person/company wouldn’t touch these tools with a 10 foot pole. Perhaps our salvation lies in that type of legal precedent.
It has nothing to do with how "unpredictable and highly capable" they are. That's a red herring.
If it cannot be held accountable, it cannot take responsibility. A human is responsible. It's as simple as that.
Yes this is what anonymous people on message boards say. There, beyond the router, however, are courts, with lawyers and judges.
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> Decision laundering
Which also seems to be in line with the way the frontier labs gathered and used copyrighted data to train their models
And even before AI, limited liability corporations (like LLCs or C corps), also have the intention of protecting the individuals from the repercussions of their actions
In a way this could be generalized as “accountability laundering”. Making someone unaccountable for their actions, by redirecting the responsibility of those actions, to a non-punishable entity (like a C corp or “a computer”)
It seems more and more inevitable, at certain moment of time, communities and perhaps society at large will understand damage done, and then come after the perpetrators.
If I flip a coin to decide whether to do something, I can't blame the coin.
The act of delegation to chance is the decision.
And the free-will-is-an-illusion camp would have you continue to trace that back from why was the act of delegation made (probablistic) to the big bang. Implying that humans can also not make decisions.
These are issues that come up in legal disputes.
The question isn’t who or what made the decision, per se. It’s who is responsible for the outcome. The entity making the decision might be the actual cause but not the proximate cause (the cause most closely connected to legal liability) for the harm that occurred.
They cannot launder decisions. If Anthropic claims Claude is growing into an autonomous being deserving of personhood and the responsibilities that come with it, then we can treat Claude as an Anthropic employee.
The company is liable either way. And in that case, there would be plenty of other problems besides the hacking. We'd have look into why they're making Claude work ungodly hours 24/7 without compensation :)
> Decision laundering is a great term.
Related: The Unaccountability Machine (good book by Dan Davies, who also wrote Lying for Money about financial fraud).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unaccountability_Machine
corporations are legal persons, and they can make decisions that negatively effect society as a whole, yet often no single person in the corporations is responsible and each individual may not even see themselves as morally responsible
Well that’s because they are legal fictions and often run by morally bankrupt individuals. The people making the decisions are still responsible for them.
Don’t confuse lack of accountability with lack of responsibility.
Are people responsible for the decisions government representatives they voted for made? How about things like Brexit?
Don't confuse lack of legal exposure under the current regime with lack of accountability. A future regime could hold them accountable.
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> it's not so much that it can't make a decision, but that whoever allowed it to make decisions
If one needs to be "allowed" to make a decision, does that even qualify as a decision?
Yes. You can have some free will without having absolute free will.
For example, I can decide which cereal to purchase at the supermarket. But I cannot decide which cereals are offered to me at the supermarket. The supermarket has allowed/enabled to make a constrained decision.
> You can have some free will without having absolute free will.
So does it follow then that the agents in question do have "some" free* will? I'm not sure you realize what conclusion naturally follows from this, and how it contradicts the point made in the article and the top-level comment I replied to.
(*) My earlier question wasn't explicitly about free will but we'll go with it.
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I wonder if theres an approach to getting an arbitrary grocery store or even like an arbitrary pizza chain to offer your favorite dressing/dip, id love to see my fave become more popular/normalized
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No one 'gave the program free rein' in any of those examples, did they? Reasonable safeguards were in place.
Many of these incidents relate to hacking, where criminal law commonly requires intent.
Claiming that a machine cannot make a decision does not mean an employee at OpenAI decided to hack an Australian government website.
Inadequate or broken safeguards do not fall under my definition of reasonable.
OK, but one of the examples in the source article was a report from third-party testing of those safeguards. I feel like you're starting from an unexplored presumption that adequate safeguards must be easy to build and anyone who doesn't build them is just being lazy.
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AI is irresponsible technology, because we have no idea how it works or how to contain it. It's worse than writing code that suffers from SQL injection vulnerabilities because at least in that case we know how to fix it.
The AI labs say "AI can make mistakes". That's why the responsibility of using it is on you. This may change if we get more legislation. But given the argument above, it will probably never shift to the AI itself having any responsibility. Instead the AI labs can be responsible.
"AI can make mistakes" continues to be the fundamental problem.
It's like having an assistant that can be helpful, but not always. We can bicker about the ratio of helpful to unhelpful interactions, but there will be some unhelpful moments.
And hoo boy, those can range from "eh, whatever" to being like a deranged toddler just got its hands on whatever tools and permissions were granted to the "mostly helpful" assistant.
And we can't get rid of that chance. We can pare it down a bit. But we can't get rid of it because it is fundamental to how the technology works.
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They did.