Comment by besterman23 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by besterman23 | Hacker News Reader

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I fully agree that it’s plausible for an AI to do things that are outside of the purview of the users intentions and be very dangerous and capable while doing so, however that fact alone doesn’t absolve me of responsibility for instantiating the AI that did a bad thing if that AI would never have done the bad thing if it was never instantiated.

You could possibly move the blame higher to the manufacturer of the product, for example, the weapons grade plutonium you provided, it doesn’t exist unless you take intentional actions to make it so, and even when it does exist it doesn’t nuke a city unless negligence or intention is applied, in both those cases the fault lies in the initial operator. We don’t blame split atoms for the chain reaction caused.

Now, if an agent decided to spontaneously and maliciously act in a way to cause harm that is in direct contradiction to the initial intent, then yeah it would totally be the AI’s fault, however I don’t think we have seen that yet (I’ll change my opinion if I’m wrong here) and until we do I can’t place blame on the machine.

>spontaneously and maliciously act in a way to cause harm that is in direct contradiction to the initial intent, then yeah it would totally be the AI’s fault,

If you ignore every instance of this happening it's really easy to see no instances of it.

>it doesn’t exist unless you take intentional actions to make it so,

Then please for the sake of all of us convince every AI lab across the planet from working on this exact goal.

We need to start thinking of AI like pets, only in this case the pets are rapidly becoming smarter than people to the point they could go feral and survive on their own.

Again, the blame game is great, but once they are loose it is too late.

> If you ignore every instance of this happening it's really easy to see no instances of it.

Yeah, if this is true then I’m wrong.

> however that fact alone doesn’t absolve me of responsibility

Where does this absurd strawman come from? The question is what can happen, not whether people have responsibility.

> You could possibly move the blame higher

We can blame the Big Bang. That doesn't have any bearing on bad things happening.

> it doesn’t exist unless you take intentional actions to make it so

First, so what? It still does exist, and putting someone on trial after the fact doesn't change that. Second, that's not remotely true -- all sorts of bad things happen that no one intended, and the more powerful and difficult to control the tool/mechanism/agent is, the more likely this is to happen.

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