"Literally solved by just destroying 99% of the economic value of the agents ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ez pz"
It would certainly be really useful to me if I could send a robot to get my groceries and not have to worry about anything. But if, even a small percentage of the time, it leaves with the groceries without paying, or smashes through a window to get in because the store is closed that day, then that's my fault. If the only way to keep those things from happening is that I can't send my robot to get groceries for me, then so be it.
Me: Yes, all you have to do is destroy the economic value of these things. "Easy fix." [This is called sarcasm]
You: "You have to take responsibility for what you do, yes."
Given how out of left field your comment is, I can't even tell if you commented on the thread you meant to.
If you, like me, want to keep most or all of that 99% of economic value, then you should be interested in the ongoing development of security for agents. But just "this is how it's going to be, so oh well!" is not a serious stance, IMO.
You're imagining that both the AI labs and the hospital victims are on the same team or somehow coordinating. They're not.
Hospitals can (and should) put up defenses, sure. But hospitals are not AI labs. AI labs are AI labs, and accordingly they are much more capable attackers than hospitals are defenders.
Hospitals cannot spend arbitrary amounts of money defending themselves from proliferating nation-state level attackers. AI labs need to prevent their tools from being used in this way. However, the only way to do that is for AI labs to neuter their tools and destroy the vast majority of the economic value. Achieving this will certainly not be easy.
I'm not proposing that we just give up or don't try to solve this. I'm saying it will not be easy.
What makes you think I'm imagining that? I'm not imagining that.
> However, the only way to do that is for AI labs to neuter their tools and destroy the vast majority of the economic value.
This seems to be our most fundamental difference in worldview. I just don't think this is true.
> I'm saying it will not be easy.
I guess I agree that it won't be easy. But I think the path seems more straightforward to me than it does to you. To me, it seems like we have the tools for this already. The risk of liability (both civil and criminal) provides a strong incentive for people and companies to be careful about what they do. This is a general mechanism, not one that is specific to AI agents. The thing that seems bad to me, with respect to this general mechanism, is that some people seem to be trying to detach the responsibility of people and companies over the agents they are running. At the moment this seems like just a rhetorical thing. I'm skeptical that any court will find that agents have their own agency for legal purposes. But to me, it seems worthwhile to continue making the point that people should be responsible for what their software is doing, which is all that I'm doing in this thread.
To me, this seems like a straightforward solution, but that doesn't mean I think it won't be messy, slow, and imperfect, so I suppose I'll allow that this probably meets your criteria of "not easy".
You cannot guarantee a robot could get items without paying. You can’t really guarantee anything in basically any scenario.
You can’t guarantee your card will work at the end of a meal or that your wallet won’t have been stolen, or while you were out someone stole all your money at the bank. There’s a chance those things happen, so do you never go for a meal?
Again there’s clearly levels where it is your fault, because you were negligent. If the robot goes mad and smashes up the place one in 3 times, obviously you can’t do it.
This is where we do things like trials, have approvals, etc so that we can make reasonable adjustments to lower downsides, plan things like insurance and then move on with our lives rather than never doing anything because it’s possible there’s a problem.
I think we need (and that there is likely to be) some test cases, and probably some new legislative text, that shift the incentive structure that people are evaluating risks against.
From reading your comment, I don't think you and I disagree at all, for what it's worth. I don't see anything here that I disagree with.
The point is the proposed easy fix is not actually feasible.
You can't just say "well if the incentives were different this would be easy to solve, ergo it's easy to solve."
No! The incentives are the way they are, and so the incentives are the problem. Broken incentives make problems effectively impossible to solve literally all the time.
"This would be easy to solve if the incentives worked a different way" is equivalent to an budding aerospace engineer saying that flight would be easy if gravity worked a different way. It's completely meaningless. Gravity works the way that it does, that's why it's hard. You don't get to just endlessly modify the parameters of the universe until you get to an easily solvable version of your problem.