Comment by beloch

Accountability falls upwards... except when it doesn't. But... it sort of does anyways.

If you are driving a car, it's pretty clear where the accountability falls. You control the car. You have free will. If the car hits a tree, you hit a tree.

What happens when a car hits another car? Things get murkier. There are lawyers who have devoted their careers to this. Sometimes nobody winds up at fault. Unavoidable accidents happen.

Now let's ask what happens when a leader orders their military to do something. e.g. Say a President instructs his troops to do whatever they think is necessary to get the job done, and they go and Abu Ghraib a bunch of prisoners. Who is responsible? The leader probably is, ultimately, but there are a lot of human beings with free will in between the leader and the people wielding electrical cords and pliars. Typically, somebody fairly close to the bottom takes the blame, even if most people suspect it should fall higher. Some low rankers will get court marshalled but the leader will have the occasional shoe thrown at him. That's okay. He's good at ducking.

Say you're running a war against people you really just want gone. Your military has a tradition of conducting laboriously researched precision strikes to take out people they don't like. Your people are working hard, but they're only managing a couple strikes a week, and you have so many more bombs than that. You don't even pay for most of them! What if you could just ask a machine to find you the leader's underlings, and their underlings, and so on, right down to raw recruits? Nobody has to check on the machine. Why bother? Just believe the machine and drop the bombs. If anyone ever calls it a war crime, you can just blame the machine, right? Well, not so fast. Most people are smarter than that!

Despite all the sci-fi we consume that portrays computers as having agency, malevolent or not, most people instinctively understand that, in the real world, computers are just tools, more akin to cars than armies. LLM's are just software that run on those tools. Anyone using a LLM can simply choose not to, or they can choose to be very careful in how they use it. There isn't a complex web of free wills to untangle. There's the machine and the person who controls the machine.

We currently have an administration that is desperate to look the other way while U.S. AI companies do things that any reasonable person would hold them accountable for. "Industry will regulate itself!" The economy mostly sucks because of this same government's complete lack of economic sense or even basic self-control, but the AI sector is propping things up. They're not going to regulate the golden goose unless the goose does something so unbelievably stupid that there's no choice. Wouldn't want to pop the bubble!

Yes, we are headed for more stupidity. The "tequila and handguns" kind of automated stupidity that only a computer and a truly feckless operator can give us.