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Comment by znpy | Hacker News Reader

> It's not so much that it can't make a decision, but that whoever allowed it to make decisions is ultimately responsible for them.

This. I agree 100%.

Computers make decisions all the time, and have been doing so for decades. But we still keep the human behind the computer accountable.

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I know this has to be the case but it’s scary since most of what agents do can be a black box.

It doesn’t matter what kind of box an agent is if the people using it don’t let you know how the decisions was made.

Except now there's no longer any guarantees there's even any people you can point at. It's already often diffuse responsbilitiy. Maybe today you can still sort of get around that by pointing at business/organization owners. But soon we're going to see situations where that isn't even realistic. For example if AI agents start spinning up their own agents which work outside of the control of anyone. We're going to need some way to deal with that.

Why would that need a new way? Or do you mean that no-one ever spun up anything at all (e.g., agent zero was never spun up or allowed to be spun up by anyone)?

Agents run on computers, those computers have owners. We have to maintain accountability and not let people who stand to get rich from privatizing the profits but socializing the risk of rogue agents from continuing to push a narrative of autonomous super intelligence that is “too powerful” to control.

That narrative is bullshit. Intelligence is not power. The power comes from hooking these agents up to everything without proper safety controls. The fact that those safety controls don’t exist yet is not humanity’s problem, it’s the frontier labs problem, and we can’t let them wriggle out of it with an Overton window shift or demanding that the government take responsibility via regulation (of course they should but it doesn’t absolve the labs of responsibility for their own actions).

Right, but if the agents broke into the computers and are hosting themselves there without the owners knowledge, are the owners responsible? We'd say whoever originated them is responsible, but what if that can no longer be determined?

Yes, like pretty much everything else, there is gray area. We can have split liabilities for different aspects of these failures. It's long been the case that people may not know what's running on their computers (botnets, etc), and I would argue there should be some form liability for your computer being used to do bad things. It should be proportionate and obviously a lot less than the principals. But keep in mind these rogue AI agents can't just hang out on someone's personal hardware, they need a lot of compute.

The missing piece right now is that our AI safety and cybersecurity controls are simply not up to snuff with the current risks that AI has introduced. Given the increased risk, we need to level up every aspect of our cybersecurity stance. These are hard problems, but not impossible given proper incentives. The issue is that no one is connecting the dots between the creation of these agents and the tools and access they are given, with the harm they may produce. Often the argument jumps straight to "it's going to get too smart for us to control" while glossing over the fact that all the power AI has was directly given to it by human choices. All this cognitive dissonance and willful blindness is caused by unchecked capitalist incentives. Think of the amount of money every single person in the frontier labs stands to make if the most optimistic predictions pan out. This is moral hazard of the highest order, and the only counter-measure that can work in our current social and political system is liability.

This is also why legal action must be taken against OpenAI for the Hugging Face incident, as well as any similar incidents. Their computer, their programs, their responsibility.

> Agents run on computers, those computers have owners.

and catering to them (boxes) to not accidentally start disseminating child porn is most commonly understood as a responsibility of the owner, the moment he plugs his device online.

> Except now there's no longer any guarantees there's even any people you can point at.

Really ? See VW diesel scandal. When there's a will...

> It's already often diffuse responsbilitiy.

yeah that's BS and the issue is that people actually believe that. the responsible party is whoever is running the ai agent.

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