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.

Decision laundering is a great term. There is ultimately a human who gave the program free rein. You can't say "sorry my car hit you, it's not my fault" especially when the person driving works for the car manufacturer too.

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2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

[deleted]

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FabHK 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Decision laundering is a great term.

Related: The Unaccountability Machine (good book by Dan Davies, who also wrote Lying for Money about financial fraud).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unaccountability_Machine

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user43928 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

No one 'gave the program free rein' in any of those examples, did they? Reasonable safeguards were in place.

Many of these incidents relate to hacking, where criminal law commonly requires intent.

Claiming that a machine cannot make a decision does not mean an employee at OpenAI decided to hack an Australian government website.

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Leynos an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Inadequate or broken safeguards do not fall under my definition of reasonable.

	▲	SpicyLemonZest 44 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		OK, but one of the examples in the source article was a report from third-party testing of those safeguards. I feel like you're starting from an unexplored presumption that adequate safeguards must be easy to build and anyone who doesn't build them is just being lazy.

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amelius an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

AI is irresponsible technology, because we have no idea how it works or how to contain it. It's worse than writing code that suffers from SQL injection vulnerabilities because at least in that case we know how to fix it.

The AI labs say "AI can make mistakes". That's why the responsibility of using it is on you.

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juliushuijnk an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

They did.

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znpy an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> 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.

	▲	cheesemoopy 18 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I know this has to be the case but it’s scary since most of what agents do can be a black box.
	▲	bartnp 10 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		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.

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caaqil 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> it's not so much that it can't make a decision, but that whoever allowed it to make decisions

If one needs to be "allowed" to make a decision, does that even qualify as a decision?

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OtherShrezzing 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Yes. You can have some free will without having absolute free will.

For example, I can decide which cereal to purchase at the supermarket. But I cannot decide which cereals are offered to me at the supermarket. The supermarket has allowed/enabled to make a constrained decision.

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caaqil 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> You can have some free will without having absolute free will.

So does it follow then that the agents in question do have "some" free* will? I'm not sure you realize what conclusion naturally follows from this, and how it contradicts the point made in the article and the top-level comment I replied to.

(*) My earlier question wasn't explicitly about free will but we'll go with it.

	▲	OtherShrezzing an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Personally I don’t agree with the article that computers cannot make decisions (or at least, I don’t think the article made any case why I should agree with the statement). While I agree that computers cannot currently be held accountable for decisions (because I do not think they have free will), I think it’s transparently clear that computers make decisions all the time, and have done since they were first implemented.