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Comment by 7moritz7 | Hacker News Reader

> allowing spicy autocomplete

If it's just autocomplete, then there is no need to worry about it. Especially from an ethical standpoint.

Scale of operations matter.

If you connect the spicy automcomplete to the "Doing Things" button then you are responsible for the ethical questions when it presses the button.

And perhaps the people who built and deployed the autocomplete and the connection as well.

Because --if you'll bear with me-- it may of course be much more involved: when (not if) AI models enter life-sustaining systems, such as hospitals, nuclear devices, or food logistics, one of them may get the others to sabotage something resulting in accidents, ranging from mild inconvenience to mass murder.

The person who connected the spicy autocomplete to the defibrillator, or the green house climate control, or the emergency button, is then not the one responsible. Responsibility lies elsewhere, and is nebulous. Think of the Boeing MAX scandal. Did anyone get punished?

That's why it's important to resist it now. Soon, the responsibility of which you speak is gone, and nobody will feel burdened when making decisions with unforeseeable consequences.

> And perhaps the people who built and deployed the autocomplete and the connection as well.

I disagree. IMO it's the person who connects the LLM to the button who bears the responsibility of the workings of the resulting contraption.

I used to hear things like “if cigarettes/alcohol were invented now, they would never allow it”, indicating that consumer protection used to be a thing, as early as 10-20 years ago. Now when AI hit the market it was obvious how bad and dangerous it was, yet governments (even the supposedly good ones in Europe which still [pretend to] do consumer protection) did nothing to protect their citizens from the harms AI was causing.

If we still did (or ever did) consumer protection like that cigarette/alcohol myth above indicates, then the makers of that tool would indeed be responsible for when their products does dangerous things.

Shareholder meeting to CEO: you must connect the button.

CEO to CIO: you must connect the button.

CIO to VP AI: you must connect the button.

VP AI to team lead AI integration: you must connect the button.

Team lead AI integration to senior: you must connect the button.

Senior to medior: you must connect the button.

Medior to junior: Hey, Olmo. That button they were talking about. You know?

Olmo: Yeah.

Medior: You have to hook it up to the LLM output.

Olmo: Why?

Medior: The boss says so.

Olmo: Ok.

Shrugs and deploys.

100 years of science fiction clearly shows that unforeseeable consequences are not that unforeseen.

If I wire my autocomplete to launch nukes, there are definitely reasons to worry.

It's not just an ethical problem.

I'd trust Claude more with nuclear codes than the current US commander in chief

Everybody knows Trump is just a figurehead. The only possible explanation for the current external policy is that America is being run by Grok.

If the Orphan Crushing Machine is just a machine you don’t need to worry about it being put on wheels.

We're actually putting it on tracked treads, those give us superior reach and ensure delivery even to the most unwilling customers.

Hopefully we never do something silly like making a lead pushing machine that operates at high velocity, then mass produce it, what a terrible precedence that would set.

"A device for quickly removing inconvenient mountains".

Quite the opposite. Humans get up to barbaric, heinous shit whenever they have new layers of indirection and force multipliers at their disposal.

If you then add randomness as an essential premise, you get The Dice Man

I think you agree with the OP. In this way, the tool has no ethical problem (there are plenty around how they were trained and such, but that's besides the point), the problems are with how it's used. The ethical problem is how people are behaving and how they are abusing each other, not the tool they are using to exert that abuse.

I suppose it's a little bit of a "guns don't kill people" argument.

The tools have different ranges of uses. A knife can be used to cut things. But while humans are among the things you can cut with it, there is a staggering array of other options which are genuinely useful in everyday life.

A gun can be used to, uh, make small but deep perforations at a distance, by throwing apx. 7 grams of copper-encased lead at high velocity at the target, with somewhat poor precision. Oh, and such an impact does stress/shatter the material around the made perforation quite a lot. So... this thing really can't be used for much anything except for killing animals without getting into contact with them, due to the peculiar way the life is sustained in the animal organisms. This, too, can be useful in everyday life although I personally would advise you, if you find yourself in such a situation, to try and move to somewhere nicer.

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