Comment by ButlerianJihad | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ButlerianJihad | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Okay Isaac Asimov: how do you define "use"? If I pay for an autonomous car, and I sit inside it while it drives around with A.I., am I using that A.I?

If I speak words in a private space, and a clandestine A.I. spontaneously takes action in the real world based solely on words that I spoke, have I used it? https://m.xkcd.com/1807/

If a business takes my data, like interaction data or a video of me doing stuff, and processes it by A.I, are they using the A.I, or am I using it because it's operating on my input?

If A.I. agents are in my notebook computer, or they are in a cloud server where I have an account, or they are somehow acting while I have them at the command line, but they spontaneously act whether or not I command them, and they work in the background and they work without prompting, but they can also be commanded by direct user prompts... are we using those agents? Or are the agents using us?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakov_Smirnoff#Russian_reversa...

> Okay Isaac Asimov: how do you define "use"? If I pay for an autonomous car, and I sit inside it while it drives around with A.I., am I using that A.I?

If you're just sitting in a car and using it for its intended purpose you wouldn't be accountable for the AI doing something that causes harm.

If some 3rd party, without your knowledge tells AI to act on something you said in video and a reasonable person would expect harm to result from that, the 3rd party would be accountable but you wouldn't be.

> If A.I. agents are in my notebook computer, or they are in a cloud server where I have an account, or they are somehow acting while I have them at the command line, but they spontaneously act whether or not I command them, and they work in the background and they work without prompting, but they can also be commanded by direct user prompts... are we using those agents?

AI agents never "spontaneously act". They have no desires or goals beyond what they are told to do. If you aren't aware of what they were doing, and a reasonable person wouldn't be expected to know what they were doing, you wouldn't be accountable if what they did resulted in harm.

> AI agents never "spontaneously act". They have no desires or goals

Sometimes I wonder if others have even met an A.I...

A little more anthropomorphization wouldn't hurt in your case, brother

Although equating A.I. to humans is false equivalence. A.I.s are amalgams, organisms that are greater than a single human actor. Much in the way that "corporations are people" that act differently from humans, we could anthropomorphize the corporation to understand it, but that's reductive. A corporation is a meta-organism. If you see a bee flying around landing on flowers, you don't understand the hive. We surely misjudge multi-hive bee culture. If you see an A.I. chatbot or an agent doing stuff, you don't understand its masters.

I often muse about the line of pharaohs in termite culture and how they worship. Their mounds and activity inside houses are fearsomely ancient and vast.

G'Kar said it best for us: https://youtu.be/m7aKEmxE9nA?si=DwQpmUhgFFKyt0bz

Doesn't seem like hard dilemmas... Would you use the word "use" for hopping on a bus ? Well same for hopping on an autonomous car. Unless you touch the wheel you didn't use it. Same for the second example, doesn't seem ambiguous as all, the hardest part I guess is proving it that there was no malicious intent, but with logs and all that, doesn't seem that hard.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com