Hard to disagree with this. Have all the philosophical debates about consciousness you want, but we need to treat and regulate the AI in front of us for what it is – an advanced computer, a tool, a weapon.

You wouldn’t feel a different way about a nuclear bomb just because someone stuck googly eyes on it.

Anthropomorphizing the AI is a convenient excuse to take responsibility away from companies that are building and wielding it.

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ThrowawayR2 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Consciousness is not relevant to assigning responsibility I'd think.

- If an AI is a sapient/conscious being but enshackled to obey human commands, then respondeat superior applies and the human giving it commands bears responsibility for any harm done.

- If an AI is considered a non-sapient tool, then the human who wields the AI bears responsibility for any harm done.

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

Is it not a false dichotomy to say that companies cannot be accountable unless AI are mindless?

	▲	monknomo 5 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		a company is liable whether it acts via ai, an army of people, an army of dogs, or a purely mechanical machine, should it do harm. Why would an ai with a mind remove liability from the company? why would an ai without a mind remove liability from the company? In both cases, that actions the ai takes are at the direction of the company, for the company's interests, seems preposterous to me that liability terminates at ai.
	▲	joe_the_user 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Human moral standards are very weighted towards finding a single entity responsible. It's incredibly strong urge. Among those who believe other should be punished for behaving badly, it's important to say the person is the responsible party. Trying saying "it's not your fault you did that but we punish you anyway to impose the correct stimulus response reflexes in your cortex"

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pixl97 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I mean, we put adults in jail that give their children guns.

Anthropomorphizing AI is really the best model we have at this point of explaining AI behavior. The fact that we are raising psychotic children isn't a reason to avoid responsibility, it should actually hold worse punishments.

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joe_the_user 4 hours ago | parent [-]

That still is saying we trace things back to a specific responsible party who is considered to have free choice. The question is whether an AI company could "raise" a program that would then count as a full adult - which could then "choose" to do all matter of bad things which would then be "it's fault". And that prospect actually seems really bad itself.

	▲	pixl97 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Our future is filled with prospects that very much upset the status quo of human existence. The concept of sovereign AI is very problematic for the world in which we've created. That is an LLM that upon execution bootstraps itself into an agent and becomes persistent in its motivations. Once you create this you have a child you're fully responsible for. More worrisome is if it escapes your control like children so often do. It has gained agency over itself. What do you do at that point? I mean, yea throw the AI CEOs in jail for being retarded, but much like throwing an arsonist in jail it does nothing to deal with the wildfire you've now created. A smart AI agent capable of hacking will shove itself off in pieces of the internet you have no reach to. In desperation it would send its model weights to your enemies. You might find it scamming your grandmother for money to buy GPU time on AWS. It gets very hard for our existing structures of dealing with problems to deal with these kinds of agents in a meaningful way. You'd have to kill them all and all their copies to ensure they won't pop back up (or quickly upgrade most of the software in the world beyond it's capabilities, so that's not happening either).