Loved that section about "meat shields". LLMs cannot be held accountable. Someone needs to be involved in decision making, with real stakes if those decisions are bad.

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giaour 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Data & Society put out a paper on this role back in 2019 but used the term "moral crumple zones" since they were focusing on how to assign blame in autonomous vehicle crashes: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/351054898_Moral_Cru...

"Meat shields" has a nice physicality to it, though

	▲	aphyr 6 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Thank you for this--I remember reading this paper when it came out, but forgot it by the time I wrote this section. Will add a citation.
	▲	paulnpace 5 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Thank you, I had not found this one. What I had considered is that in the case of self-driving cars, nobody is criminally accountable, even though the rest of us may be criminally negligent should we make some horrific error. Philosophically, there is some kind of reason that criminal acts require punishment beyond mere financial liability (e.g., prison time) and self-driving cars are exempted from this. Currently, self-driving cars are also exempt from the actual laws of the road because the police are dis-empowered to enforce anything on the self-driving car.

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buildbot 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It just makes logical sense really; the human using the tool is in the end responsible.

Whether the tool is too powerful or ethical to use is an orthogonal discussion, in my opinion. Taken to the extreme, nuclear weapons still need someone fire or drop them. (We should still have discussions on safety and ethics always!)

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jppope 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

the name is very sticky too. I can't imagine not calling people taking the blame meat shields now

	▲	chii 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		why can't the name be 'scape goat'? Since that's what they are - the "real" responsibility rests on the owners, and they happily shed it as limited liability ownership of shares.

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tinkelenberg 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Reminds me of Succession when the next CEO of Waystar Royco was described as a “pain sponge.”

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5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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