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AI has a different risk profile than humans. They are a lot more risky for business operations where failure is wholly unacceptable under any circumstance. Th

• lxgr 2y ago
  Isn't everybody in NYC already? (The dangers of bad driving are much higher for pedestrians than for people in cars; there are more of the former than of the latter in NYC; I'd expect there to be a non-zero number of fully self driving cars already in the city.)
  • rockskon 2y ago
    That doesn't answer my question.
    • 9dev 2y ago
      It does, in a way; AI is already there, all around you, whether you like it or not. Technological progress is Pandora’s box; you can’t take it back or slow it down. Businesses will use AI for critical workflows, and all good that they bring, and all bad too, will happen.
      • rockskon 2y ago
        How about you answer my question since he did not. Would you trust your life to a self-driving car in New York City traffic?
        • lxgr 2y ago
          GP got it exactly right: I already am. There's no way for me to opt out of having self-driving cars on the streets I regularly cross as a pedestrian.
          • rockskon 2y ago
            Do you live in a dense city like New York City or San Francisco? Or places with less urban sprawl that are much easier for self-driving cars to navigate? Also you still haven't answered my question. Would you get in a self-driving car in a dense urban environment such as New York City? I'm not asking if such vehicles exist on the road. And related questions: Would you get in one such car if you had alternatives? Would you opt to be in such a car instead of one driven by a person or by yourself?
            • ishtanbul 2y ago
              I would
            • dalyons 2y ago
              Yes? I’ve taken many many waymos in SF. Perfectly happy trusting my life to them. I have alternatives (uber) and I pick self driving . Are you up to date on how many rides they’ve done in sf now? I am not unusual
            • lxgr 2y ago
              > Would you get in a self-driving car in a dense urban environment such as New York City? [...] Would you get in one such car if you had alternatives? I fortunately do have alternatives and accordingly mostly don't take cars at all. But given the necessity/opportunity: Definitely. Being in a car, even (or especially) with a dubious driver, is much safer (at NYC traffic speeds) than being a pedestrian sharing the road with it. And that's my entire point: Self-driving cars, like cars in general, are potentially a much larger danger to others (cyclists, pedestrians) than they are to their passengers. That said, I don't especially distrust the self-driving kind – I've tried Waymo before and felt like it handled tricky situations at least as well as some Uber or Lyft drivers I've had before. They seem to have a lot more precision equipment than camera-only based Teslas, though.
  • chefandy 2y ago
    If there are any fully-autonomous cars on the streets of nyc, there aren’t many of them and I don’t think there’s any way for them to operate legally. There has been discussion about having a trial.
• wwweston 2y ago
  We can just insulate businesses employing AI from any liability, problem solved.
  • fsloth 2y ago
    I guess - yes from business&liability sense? ”This service you are now paying for 100$? We can sell it to you for 5$ but with the caveat _we give no guarantees if it works or is it fit for purpose_ - click here to accept”.
    • lazide 2y ago
      Haha, they’d just continue selling it for $100 then change the TOS on page 50 to say the same thing.
  • 9dev 2y ago
    „Well, our AI that was specifically designed for maximising gains above all else may indeed have instructed the workers to cut down the entire Amazonas forest for short-term gains in furniture production.“ But no human was involved in the decision, so nobody is liable and everything is golden? Is that the future you would like to live in?
    • lazide 2y ago
      Hmmm, how much stock do I own in this hypothetical company? (/s, kinda)
    • wwweston 2y ago
      Apparently I need to work on my deadpan delivery. Or just articulate things openly: we already insulate business owners from liability because we think it tunes investment incentives, and in so doing have created social entities/corporate "persons"/a kind of AI who have different incentives than most human beings but are driving important social decisions. And they've supported some astonishing cooperation which has helped produce things like the infrastructure on which we are having this conversation! But also, we have existing AIs of this kind who are already inclined to cut down the entire Amazonas forest for furnitue production because it maximizes their function. That's not just the future we live in, that's the world we've been living in for a century or few. On one hand, industrial productivity benefits, on the other hand, it values human life and the ecology we depend on about like any other industrial input. Yet many people in the world's premier (former?) democracy repeat enthusiastic endorsements of this philosophy reducing their personal skin to little more than an industrial input: "run the government like a business." Unless people change, we are very much on track to create a world where these dynamics (among others) of the human condition are greatly magnified by all kinds of automation technology, including AI. Probably starting with limited liability for AIs and companies employing them, possibly even statutory limits, though it's much more likely that wealthy businesses will simply be insulated with by the sheer resources they have to make sure the courts can't hold them accountable, even where we still have a judicial system that isn't willing to play calvinball for cash or catechism (which, unfortunately, does not seem to include a supreme court majority). In short, you and I probably agree that liability for AI is important, and limited liability for it isn't good. Perhaps I am too skeptical that we can pull this off, and being optimistic would serve everyone better.
• ijidak 2y ago
  It is amazing to me that we have reached an era where we are debating the trade-off of hiring thinking machines! I mean, this is an incredible moment from that standpoint. Regarding the topic at hand, I think that there will always be room for humans for the reasons you listed. But even replacing 5% of humans with AI's will have mind boggling consequences. I think you're right that there are jobs that humans will be preferred for for quite some time. But, I'm already using AI with success where I would previously hire a human, and this is in this primitive stage. With the leaps we are seeing, AI is coming for jobs. Your concerns relate to exactly how many jobs. And only time will tell. But, I think some meaningful percentage of the population -- even if just 5% of humanity will be replaced by AI.
• miki123211 2y ago
  This is a really hard and weird ethical problem IMHO, and one we'll have to deal with sooner or later. Imagine you have a self-driving AI that causes fatal accidents 10 times less often than your average human driver, but when the accidents happen, nobody knows why. Should we switch to that AI, and have 10 times fewer accidents and no accountability for the accidents that do happen, or should we stay with humans, have 10x more road fatalities, but stay happy because the perpetrators end up in prison? Framed like that, it seems like the former solution is the only acceptable one, yet people call for CEOs to go to prison when an AI goes wrong. If that were the case, companies wouldn't dare use any AI, and that would basically degenerate to the latter solution.
  • okasaki 2y ago
    Wait, why would we want 10x more traffic fatalities?
    • stavros 2y ago
      We wouldn't, that's their point.
  • moritzwarhier 2y ago
    I don't know about your country, but people going to prison for causing road fatalities is extremely rare here. Even temporary loss of the drivers license has a very high bar, and that's the main form of accountability for driver behavior in Germany, apart from fines. Badly injuring or killing someone who themselves did not violate traffic safety regulations is far from guaranteed to cause severe repercussions for the driver. By default, any such situation is an accident and at best people lose their license for a couple of months.
    • paulryanrogers 2y ago
      Drivers are the apex predators. My local BMV passed me after I badly failed the vision test. Thankfully I was shaken enough to immediately go to the eye doctor and get treatment.
  • 2y ago
• MaxPock 2y ago
  It depends with what the risk is .Would it be whole or in part ? In an organisation,failure by an HR might present an isolated departmental risk while an AI might not be the case.
• zelphirkalt 2y ago
  Deterministic they may be, but unforeseeable for humans.
• ajmurmann 2y ago
  Every statistic I've seen indicated much better accident rates for self-driving cars than human drivers. I've taken Waymo rides in SF and felt perfectly safe. I've taken Lyft and Uber and especially taxi rides where I felt much less safe. So I definitely would take the self-driving car. Just because I don't understand am accident doesn't make it more likely to happen. The one minor risk I see is the cat being too polite and getting effectively stuck in dense traffic. That's a nuisance though. Is there something about NYC traffic I'm missing?
  • aprilthird2021 2y ago
    There's one important part about risk management though. If your Waymo does crash, the company is liable for it, and there's no one to shift the blame onto. If a human driver crashes, that's who you can shift liability onto. Same with any company that employs AI agents. Sure they can work 24/7, but every mistake they make the company will be liable for (or the AI seller). With humans, their fraud, their cheating, their deception, can all be wiped off the company and onto the individual
    • ethbr1 2y ago
      The next step is going to be around liability insurance for AI agents. That's literally the point of liability insurance -- to allow the routine use of technologies that rarely (but catastrophically) fail, by ammortizing risk over time / population.
      • aprilthird2021 2y ago
        Potentially. I would be skeptical that businesses can do this to shield themselves from the liability. For example, VW could not use insurance to protect them from their emissions scandal. There are thresholds (fraud, etc.) that AI can breach, which I don't think insurance can legally protect you from
        • ethbr1 2y ago
          Not in the sense of protection, but in the sense of financial coverage. Claims still made: liability insurance pays them.