2 ms·

People don't kill people. Decisions kill people. Sometimes those decisions are obvious, like pulling a trigger while pointing a loaded weapon at a person. Some

by gryfft 4y ago

People don't kill people. Decisions kill people. Sometimes those decisions are obvious, like pulling a trigger while pointing a loaded weapon at a person. Sometimes they're very slightly less obvious, like giving a 17-year-old a sportscar. Sometimes they're not obvious to most people at all, like lead paint or asbestos or cigarettes. LLMs have made incredible strides in recent time, but certainly have not displayed robust decision-making. A human decision to put LLMs in charge of human lives would be a lethal decision as things stand.

buescher 4y ago
I don't think we really disagree. It is a human moral decision to kill that kills, so it is a human that is morally responsible. Putting an unpredictable chatbot in a safety-critical loop is simply deranged in a very strict sense of the term. Hazards of modernity like lead paint and so on were not comparable - not to say the moral difference mitigates the harm. The next step in the abhorrent line of reasoning in the article ("I suspended my wife over a cliff by a rope and now I'm going to do some experiments with this newfangled fire stuff to see if it's dangerous") is to pose the trolley problem, which is marginally more complex and just as objectionable.
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago
  > Putting an unpredictable chatbot in a safety-critical loop is simply deranged in a very strict sense of the term. How is this different to self-driving cars. They already killed people, like when uber self driving car killed a pedestrian Whwther the driver should have reacted is not relevant - you put AI in anything safety critical, they will kill people
  - buescher 4y ago
    I think self-driving cars are sort of nuts too for other reasons but the companies doing those are supposed to be doing a lot of safety engineering - to make sure responses in safety-critical controls are predictably safe. Nothing is perfectly safe, but deliberately creating lethal hazards is deranged. That's the difference. People create hazards for other people. AI is not a special kind of human-created hazard.

by gryfft 4y ago

buescher 4y ago

I don't think we really disagree. It is a human moral decision to kill that kills, so it is a human that is morally responsible. Putting an unpredictable chatbot in a safety-critical loop is simply deranged in a very strict sense of the term. Hazards of modernity like lead paint and so on were not comparable - not to say the moral difference mitigates the harm. The next step in the abhorrent line of reasoning in the article ("I suspended my wife over a cliff by a rope and now I'm going to do some experiments with this newfangled fire stuff to see if it's dangerous") is to pose the trolley problem, which is marginally more complex and just as objectionable.

ClumsyPilot 4y ago
> Putting an unpredictable chatbot in a safety-critical loop is simply deranged in a very strict sense of the term. How is this different to self-driving cars. They already killed people, like when uber self driving car killed a pedestrian Whwther the driver should have reacted is not relevant - you put AI in anything safety critical, they will kill people
- buescher 4y ago
  I think self-driving cars are sort of nuts too for other reasons but the companies doing those are supposed to be doing a lot of safety engineering - to make sure responses in safety-critical controls are predictably safe. Nothing is perfectly safe, but deliberately creating lethal hazards is deranged. That's the difference. People create hazards for other people. AI is not a special kind of human-created hazard.