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▲ lukewarm707 an hour ago

> "Should such security breaches be solved by improving security, or by doing something about the models?"

The philosophical question about free will is actually the grounding of the legal one.

Sam wanted to be the best, so Sam accelerated to 120mph in his car and lost control. You are the judge:

a) Sam is responsible. Convict Sam and suspend Sam's driving license.

b) The car is responsible. Tell Sam to make the car safer.

Capacity: was the car a legal person? Clearly no. But maybe at best the car in some way commited the physical act of going fast.

However, that alone would not establish guilt. "The act is not culpable unless the mind is guilty" (mens rea).

Did the car "consiously" disregard a duty of care by going 120mph? Did the car know that it was wrong to go 120mph and yet choose to do it anyway?

On the question of free will, the car could not do otherwise. It it did not consciously, knowingly, purposely, or recklessly accelerate to that speed. The car did not have a guilty mind because it did not have a mind at all.

So in terms of justice and resolution, none of the focus here is on the car.

▲Sniffnoy an hour ago | parent [-]

Ah, I see. It appears we have an implicit disagreement of scale.

I actually do disagree with much the more explicit content of your comment, but I am not going to bother to expand on that, because it is the less directly relevant of the two disagreements here, and it would take time to write that.

The more relevant disagreement is that you are (I gather) assuming a context where justice and restitution are a sufficient response to the problem (or else you wouldn't be focusing on them to this extent, I am inferring). Like, where the incidents don't get that much bigger than what has already happened. So the question becomes how do we distribute the loss, and how do we disincentivize them.

However, when the scale of a potential incident gets big enough, justice and deterrence are not sufficient; prevention becomes the far more relevant consideration. You may have noticed that many people are worried about potential human extinction as a result of AIs. In that case, prevention becomes the only consideration -- justice is useless.

So there seems to be an implicit disagreement here between thinking of such events as being on a scale not too much larger than that which has already happened, being a new normal that the legal system will need to handle, vs thinking of such events as warning shots for something that requires prevention and not justice.

So, while I also disagree with the more explicit content of your comment, the fact is I simply wasn't thinking about such matters in the first place -- I was talking about this in the frame of a problem that requires prevention, I wasn't thinking about the justice question at all. It honestly failed to occur to me that you might be thinking of this as a problem where justice suffices!

Edit: You might notice this in how I framed the question in my previous comment. I didn't ask "who should bear the liability?" I asked "which should be done differently to prevent such incidents?" But your response is about liability, not prevention!

Edit again: Sorry, I should probably also say that I do agree with you that the idea of having the liability fall on the AI is nonsense. (Should have probably led with that, really; I'm a bit scatterbrained right now.) We disagree about why it is nonsense, and about whether it will necessarily continue to be nonsense, but we agree it is presently nonsense. So insofaras the question is "how should liability be distributed between the AI and the operator", we both agree the answer is, it all falls on the operator, not on the AI. However, I do not understand that to be the relevant question here! Both in that, in questions of liability, there are other parties it may fall on and be distributed between (the company providing the AI, the company that had security vulnerabilities and got hacked as a result, etc); and in that I just don't consider liability all that relevant here compared to prevention (for reasons already described).

OK I think that was probably wordier than necessary but I'm in a hurry right now, sorry! Gotta go, not taking time to edit this down.