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Comment by it_citizen | Hacker News Reader

From an utilitarian point of view, AI only have to create less problems that humans.

When I see physicians like Lynn Webster prescribing insane doses of Oxycontin for any injury, ignoring the warnings of the people dealing with the disastrous results and finally making up excuses for the death of his patients, I am pretty sure a lot of families would have preferred to take their chance with IA.

But of course, a fully utilitarian society would probably be a nightmare.

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It’s a weird one. I’m with you and utilitarianism, but a lot of people seem to feel that e.g. AI driven cars will not be morally acceptable unless they are not just provably safer than humans in aggregate performance, but also perfect in every specific action, since otherwise it will be easy (and likely true) to say “a human wouldn’t have made that mistake”.

I get that feeling when I try to imagine if I would prefer an AI to drive my car. Rationally, I know it would probably be safer, but at the same time I would still feel safer driving it myself.

I imagine it is a mix of an illusion of control and "it won't happen to me because I drive better than the average driver".

Agreed, and also the particular mistakes AI will make seem so obvious and dumb to us. There is no way I would crash into emergency vehicles with flashing lights, ever. So intuitively AI is scary. But never mind that it also will avoid rear-ending people due to lack of attention, which is a very human mistake and much more frequent.

Certainly humans can be unreliable. I guess my concern lies in the "black box" neural network design, by which, even if it mostly works great, it could also trot down some path that makes it randomly do something highly undesirable.

Safeguards are fine if you know what to safeguard against.

I suppose neither a human doctor nor an AI doctor should be "obeyed"; they are both there to assist the patient, not to control the patient.

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