A response to this, which I think is reasonable. Its a bit of a fuzzy line, but the likelihood there is "magical maniacal planning" happening here is unlikely (about as unlikely as that planning happening in hidden vector states between layers).
The solution is simple: hold anyone who deploys an agent responsible for its behavior. If it commits 10 counts of felony hacking, ouch. If it kills 10 pedestrians by running a red light, ouch. If this is "human level intelligence", then setting it loose is the same as instructing / coercing a human to do an activity. If I strap a bomb to someone and force them to run into a crowded building (or put them in a scenario where that is the only reasonable choice), I'm held responsible.
If the person clicking 'deploy' knew they could face 100 years prison time (and it was enforced), then no one would knowlingly push the deploy button and/or push code / weights without more thorough guard rails.
We aren’t going to do that because intent matters. You need to control your dog and there should be penalties if you don’t, but if your dog bit someone because you didn’t control it properly, that’s not the quite the same as if you bit someone.
Another analogy: a zoo is responsible for protecting the public, and should be reponsible if an animal escapes and hurt someone. But a zoo employee wouldn’t have the same kind of responsibility for that incident as if they attacked someone themselves.
If someone died, there’s a difference between manslaughter and murder.
Nowadays, it’s common for bad things to happen due to systemic problems. It sucks but that’s the modern condition. When that happens, the answer is to fix the system and scapegoating employees is a rather indirect way of doing that.
Sorry I disagree with that. This is more like gain of function research. You are trying to develop an agent with the ability to do hacking and the like without having proper safeguards. When it breaks free and causes massive damage, the lab is at fault. Or do you think "we were just trying to help" is an excuse to kill millions of people too? This isn't an alligator wondering down main street, this is an agent that could potentially ruin lives and is being actively trained to do hacking in an adversarial testing environment trying to push its limits to develop that ability. Furthermore, the people doing it have seen it cause similar problems in the past, and now have concrete evidence they cannot properly control it. So I think pressing the "play" button effectively transfers responsibility and liability to them for doing so.
In fact the people pressing the play button are the ones telling us it cannot be controlled, it is a threat to human and national security, and warning us of the impending damages they are about to cause. I'd say we've established motive (profit at the cost of safety).
To abuse your metaphor: if the zoo was genetically modifying animals to give them enhanced abilities to escape and kill, and then putting them into an escape room with a reward for escaping / killing, then they would be liable for doing so if the animal went on to kill. Just the same as a trained fighting dog bite is different than an accidental bite from an otherwise peaceful animal (you turned the dog into this monster, now its your fault).
I think an alligator wandering down main street is worse than anything that happened at OpenAI so far, but everyone agrees it's a warning shot and could get worse.
Millions of people seems, uh, much worse than that. The Ukraine war is estimated at 2 million casualties.
Even with your dog analogy... if my dog bites someone, it's not the same as if I bit someone. But what about the second time my dog bites someone, when I already knew it had done it once?
Criminals also try their best to cover up their tracks but that doesn't mean we don't try to catch them too. So nothing should change for AI powered xyz too. I kind of agree. You can't blame a model for running a red light when you are in the machine as it's operator. It just doesn't make sense. That's just called negligence, and it has always been the case in industrial settings. Robot arm slaps someone to death. I'm sure it's hard to argue its the robot or the manufacturer's fault.
Sue the operator. In this case, it seems like OpenAI was testing its own models. The operator and the manufacturer are the same.
In cases where the operator is not the manufacturer, the operator can decide if they should in turn sue to manufacturer because they built faulty machinery.
I mean you only need at add the stipulation that there was clear negligence or malice in your instructions to the agent.
like we already do with a bunch of other crimes.
The police and government will need to 1000x their AI adoption to successfully attribute crimes to real-world people. We BARELY caught any cybercrime before AI, it is utterly hopeless now unless they lean into the same tools.
We still have guns and knives and nail guns and even cars. They automate something, but also have potential to injure and kill. You just weigh the pros and cons. You don't just not do something because there's a risk of death. Cars are basically metal coffins. Just don't drive when drunk, etc? Basic competence and operational safety and responsibility? If cruise control made you free from blame everyone would just be driving drunk off their ass with cruise control on. How is that more thought out?
If you engage cruise control, and it starts to accelerate uncontrollable, or swerves your steering wheel sharply and causes an accident, then you can sue the manufacturer. The cruise control did not work as intended.
The reason why we have cruise control is that manufacturers went to great lengths to make sure that it works as intended. Threat of lawsuits is what made them do that.
I hate to break it to you, but you are currently still responsible for killing somebody while driving a car on cruise control, especially if you act recklessly.
EDIT: to be less snarky, there are obvious exceptions if a manufacturer defect is involved. But I still imagine it turns on things like foreseeability and proximate cause (IANAL). Nevertheless, if you were asleep at the wheel, you're getting held responsible.
This should be the law but it will never be. If your vicious dog murders someone, you will get a ticket. When you intentionally break a traffic law and kill someone, it's involuntary manslaughter (at most.) It's a mitigating circumstance if you say that you were drunk when you committed a crime. People are really hostile to accepting the results of acts that they embarked upon fully aware that those results were a distinct possibility - even if the benefits that they anticipated from those acts were partially due to the riskiness of those acts.
It leads to a society where people are economically encouraged to take risks with other peoples' safety. The initial sin was mens rea, which turns judges and juries into mandatory mind readers. It opens up the possibility of prosecuting people for changing the states of other people's minds. It makes not knowing the risks a mitigating factor, so incentivizes and encourages ignorance. It forces people to guess the internal states of people of vastly different backgrounds and experiences, who will think the best of the people most like them, and the worst of people most like the people they don't like.
I've always been against penalties for drunk driving. The correct alternative is to tell people that if they're drunk and involved in an accident, 1) the trial will ignore the details of the event and concentrate only on the validity of the tests of intoxication, and 2) the crime will be considered to have been premeditated. Ignorance of the law will actually be the only excuse.
edit: instead of posting checkpoints on the road with cops giving everybody sobriety tests, post cops in front of liquor stores whose job is simply to tell people "if you hurt somebody while driving drunk, you will not be entitled to a trial unless there is something wrong with the sobriety test."
(IANAL) Unless you are an AI expert (like OpenAI staff) and should know better from the start, or have previously seen your agent do something illegal, then I think you can fairly claim ignorance of the risks, which ought to absolve you of liability. If the agent does something illegal, it wasn't forseeable on your part.
For example, say you buy a dog that turns out to be dangerous. The first time it bites somebody, you may not be liable because you didn't know the dog was dangerous. The second time it bits somebody, you may be liable, because now you did know (and didn't take any steps to prevent).
Criminal liability perhaps, not civil liability which has a way lower bar when it comes to conviction...
But in essence, you're right, that new "AI agent paradigm" has to be tried in court and it will, as I doubt the legislator will change existing laws...
> The first time it bites somebody, you may not be liable because you didn't know the dog was dangerous
Is it the case though? If I get a lion or a tiger as a pet (I don't know if it's legal), there is a reasonable assumption that a lion is dangerous for me and others... If I get a rottweiler, there is a reasonable assumption for that sort of breed that it is a dangerous dog if it ever end up killing someone even though it behaved before...
It's not ignorance of the law. It's ignorance of the risk. You have a reasonable expectation of being unable to predict the future. It's only when you "should have known" that you may incur a liability for disregarding a risk.
I believe they're arguing AI manufacturers and developers are the people primarily aware of the risks, and not random users necessarily.
If OpenAI staff runs an ExploitBench knowing the risks, and it hacks into HF, they KNEW the risk going into it and a bad/illegal outcome happened
If a random teacher opens ChatGPT and asks "Hey what's the answer to this practice SAT problem?", and it hacks the CollegeBoard for the answer, said teacher probably wasn't aware that was even an outcome that could plausibly occur. OpenAI would have that foreknowledge, though
Also NAL just legal-curious: Intent is a spectrum in our legal structure, with several checkpoints used at different points. It’s very reasonable to pick one of the lower ones for this kind of thing and I really don’t see why the legal system is taking so long on it.
Higher intent would be something like “knowingly false statements, or reckless disregard for the truth” seen in our defamation law.
Lower intent would be something like “failed to exercise reasonable care” seen in civil negligence.
In my eyes,this is a solved problem that our dysfunctional congress should have solved easily by now. Perhaps they are being paid to not solve it by moneyed interests.
And when you're rich, you're not responsible for anything at all....
I mean, you and me may be held responsible ya. OpenAI Sammy? Never.
And what about the agents showing up from some random IP overseas that have ran off with your bank account? Maybe in a few years they'll trace the proxy hops back to some agents cluster here in the states.
If you truly want to make the spurious claim that there's no difference between you and a smart thermostat, go for it. Me, I hold myself in a higher regard.
The onus isn't on the government to tell people what to do, if you are okay with the massive legal risks what is the issue here? That you aren't going to get bailed out by the American government? Why should citizens care about that?
equally valid analog: had they merely written a script to do the hugging face exploit, they would go to prison. However, since an "agent" wrote the script for them, nothing happens?
It's a reasonable direction, but most of online systems aren't designed for this. This would require persistent connections of any accounts you create to your identity, and disallowing anonymous actions.
the person who controlled / started it? If open AI had hired a team of 50 hackers to break into hugging face, they would be prosecuted (as would the hackers). If they had written a bot to break into hugging face, the devs and managers who wrote it would be prosecuted. Just because the agent wrote the code on their behalf doesn't change the equation much.
Next you'll want us to prosecute coal company executives for air pollution that killed millions? PFAS makers and companies that distribute it in products causing cancer for dozens of generations? Capitalism needs compliance! /s
You could probably score 100% on ARC 3 if you were motivated enough. I find some of the current problems to be kind of like Chess - mechanically simple, and ~solvable, but it's difficult to force myself to think at length about a monotonous and meaningless problem. The machines do have an advantage on the "energy" front; they've become almost psychotically persistent (and don't get tired after too many prompts).
Anyway yes I think we've had AGI for a while now, even if the GI doesn't quite match up with what we expect from a human.
Its interesting because I didn't think it was, but then reading the NVIDIA approach, this kind of loop plus generating a program to explain things. Maybe that is AGI? I don't know, but it seems like an additional layer that maybe is a fundamental shift in capabilities (kind of like reinforcement learning and COT was).
The capability for a man-made machine machine to solve problems drawn from arbitrary problem domains without domain specific pre-training: Artificial. General. Intelligence. AGI. It is what the term of art means.
AbhiramaVS I think your choice to use exceptions is fine, it matches closely with Java / Python your inspirations. The "show me every error" crowd loves to harp on this issue, but the truth is, its a tradeoff like all others.
Exceptions provide flexibility in error handling, and most code just forwards and you end up in the same situation anyway. Something like this (go style):
if result, err := do_thing(); err != nil {
log.errorf("Got an error! %v", err);
return err;
}
Or the rust equivalent isn't super useful, the code is just outputting an inferior form of stack tracing and debugging.
Honestly unless the code at the immediate site of the error can handle the issue, or perhaps one level higher, having precise error information (usually obscured by some generic Error class anyway) isn't very helpful, and ends up propagating up to a high level where the whole thing is terminated / cleaned up anyway, which is what exceptions provide automatically.
Also, only catching the things that you can deal with and know about is useful in the sense it keeps code flexible (e.g. you don't handle a DiskFull exception because the only thing you can do with it is throw anyway, and if you had a DiskFull error returned, you would just return it up the stack / panic). As new unhandled errors emerge, you just throw them up the stack, the same way error code would, except errors just require you to explicitly manage the machinery everywhere, requiring rigid, over-specified, fragile code in many cases.
I do see the argument for explicit errors especially in system programming, realtime / perf-critical, kernels, etc. But this language doesn't appear to be targeted at that, and uses GC. So having exceptions seems like a valid design choice to me. Using them also frees you a bit since you can pass around functions, captured references, threads, etc. in a bytecode + GC lang without worrying to much about the error states and memory ownership.
(not a repub) I don't defend it, its outright fraud, but I also accept the reality that it is a more visible, and perhaps exaggerated, form of what has been ongoing forever.
Those who seek power seek it to:
1. Enrich themselves and their family
2. Wield it to achieve their means
The "pay to play" is rife everywhere. The contractors who get a sweet deal from local / fed government, the competition is stifled. The senators who make 10's of millions on insider information. The imminent domain cases where property is seized so corporation / donor can make millions. The "futures market" where insiders use their knowledge of product release date to swindle money for ordinary folks. The crypto scams, lotteries, casinos, street vendors, telemarketers, info-mercials, self-help gurus, snake oil sales, lemon peddlers, and more.
The truth is that the human system has not deviated far from the imposed hierarchy of feudalism / monarchy, we have only become better at concealing it, making it more potent in some ways. Power, corruption, opportunism, and greed are part of our nature. In an extremely large population with a democratic veneer, the levers of power become diffuse an ineffable, until they are blatantly shoved into our face.
In some ways I'm glad because its only through a constant vigilance and resetting the public vigilance that these kind of things can be controlled to any degree. Its an entropic force, seeping into the system at all times, only kept at bay by the disdain of the populace and fear in the hearts of the ruling elites.
Its definitely not a Republicans only phenomenon, the list on both sides of the aisle is embarrassingly long. But due to how our political system is setup, and human psychology, little will change by voting. People are tribal, and only have two choices in the matter, both of which are usually power-seeking corrupted. The prisoner's dilemma is giving the US a life-sentence.
> but I also accept the reality that it is a more visible, and perhaps exaggerated, form of what has been ongoing forever
Thanks for sharing this. It's a deep insight for me. I did not understand how the same people that were deeply skeptical about the state, ended up being so quiet when the state's corruption became flagrant and blatant. But this line of thinking makes a lot of sense.
It sounds like equivocating nonsense to me. No one expects a society to be completely free of corruption, but there is a difference between at least putting up a veneer of working towards transparency, and unabashed pay to play corruption.
In fact, the corruption is what the voters want, to show that they prioritize their group (white, men, rural, rich, benefactors, whatever helps you identify with the “winner” etc) at the expense of others.
I don't expect it to be free of corruption, but I can also acknowledge the systemic forces that are beyond my control which enable the corrupt excesses we see. Unfortunately, until the incentives reverse, it will continue.
One of the easiest and most assured paths to success, wealth, a comfortable life, influence, significance, and security, is by playing the power game. Hence, it will attract those who seek those ends, and discourage those who let beliefs, values, morals, or other similar concerns interfere with their own acquisition of power.
Its only inevitable then that the most corrupt players will eventually ascend, as they continue to amass money and power in such a system. Believing that the real difference is voting for "the good guys" and that will cause wide-sweeping change is probably what Tea Party voters thought in the early 2000s before they morphed into MAGA.
One way to think about it is that visible corruption is a constant fraction of invisible corruption in the system. Like a fixed fraction of an iceberg that is visible. One can estimate total corruption in the system by what is visible/flagrant. Based on this, the order of magnitude of corruption being done by this admin is orders of magnitude more than prior ones.
Given that about a third of the voters are fully in support of this, and likely about similar numbers are oblivious, I expect that nothing will be done about it once this admin goes out of power.
Maybe a few people will be made scapegoats to pacify the third that want justice (likely low level/weak ones), but the top level of perpetrators will be untouched and keep most of the loot.
Correct, no justification to breed is needed whatsoever. Its a biological drive similar to eating and drinking, albeit on longer timescales and across generations rather than individuals.
However, thought processes like the one you identified above are probably adaptive, as gene lines which spend time trying to find the "justifiable reasons" for breeding were likely eliminated.
Gene lines where "I can raise my kids with like-minded community of peers", "I feel ready for more in life", and "sharing children with my parents, and letting my kids bond with healthy gradparents" (restatements of your phrasings) win out and reliably produce healthy offspring. So those reasons become strong motivators (despite being un-necessary justifications), that may seem irrational at first glance.
This is the human equivalent of "simply write code with no bugs". If you can't figure out how to write code without bugs, you think you can cause a human being in a complex environment to do exactly what you want against all influences?
How effective are you at controlling anyone in your life, including yourself? If we're really honest, we have a moderate amount of control of ourselves within strict limits (sleep, food, water, temperature, hormones, organ function, etc.). We have little to no actual control of others, we can only try to create incentives / structures to coax behavior we desire.
Posted study in comment below, but actually harsher parenting tends to result in more rebellious behavior.
Maybe a counter point: would you work better for a boss that was up your ass constantly and forcing you to work on stuff you didn't want? I've found I'm more effective when incentives are aligned and my boss is supportive and collaborative. Same works for parenting.
Interesting, so this was effective when you were a child and you only listened and never did anything your parents told you not to? Sounds like if that was effective it might be your personality, but most people aren't like that.
The vast majority of kids will require borderline abuse to force them to do things on a regular they don't want to. If they are forced, it tends to breed rebellion behind their parents back (there's a reason that the stereotype of the naughty "preachers kid" exists).
"""
Similar to findings regarding smoking and alcohol use, harsh parenting is considered to be one of the most important predictors of adolescent involvement in risky sexual behaviors
"""
> If they are forced, it tends to breed rebellion behind their parents back (there's a reason that the stereotype of the naughty "preachers kid" exists).
That's part of parenting - i.e not being agreeable, correct?
This is the truth. You are a parent, not a friend. Yes, there will be attempts at circumvention, these will be detected and punished.
Modern parenting is not science, it is woke b.s. and has led to young people today with multiple psychological illnesses, apathy and the Peter Pan syndrome.
https://nonlineartransform.substack.com/p/relax-about-neural...
There's also an argument here for why its _better_ for monitoring (because we have the whole state space).
reply