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That's a ridiculous distinction. Is AI less deterministic than an airline dealing with weather? Of course not. The difference is one of those two things has a

by CPLX 12d ago

That's a ridiculous distinction. Is AI less deterministic than an airline dealing with weather? Of course not. The difference is one of those two things has a culture of safety and is well regulated, and the other one isn't.

bayindirh 12d ago
An airline has a weather radar which shows the same thing for the same thing of weather event ahead. So, for similar weather phenomena, radar shows a similar thing. For that thing, procedures and regulations are built. So regulations fit into a well understood phenomena, incl. "return back because that thing is way powerful for us". For the same prompt, an AI model can return two completely different outputs, incl. but not limited to content, length, formatting and tiny details. What you get is a single instance. So, regulating an AI model for safety or any other property is not as easy as regulating air travel. Moreover, you have much stronger motivations for regulating airlines. Otherwise people die in a visible and gruesome way. With AI, it's easy to whitewash problems. Somebody committed suicide? "They were already unstable". AI told something wrong and created problems? "The tech can’t guarantee truth because it's not alive, it can't understand right and wrong". It did something good? "It's probably a sentient being, we shall respect them". I'm for regulating these things. They are dangerous as they are useful (sometimes), but the forces and motivations for regulating it is not the same.
- CPLX 12d ago
  Of course, it's the same. It's computer software. It's an incredibly powerful business automation tool. It's a lot of things. What it's not is God or an independently conscious entity that somehow trumps a thousand years of common law that's built up until now about torts and liability. Of course, there are some novel issues here that'll pop up here and there, but the idea that this is fundamentally different is propaganda on the part of these AI labs because the more boring, obvious situation doesn't favor them.
  - saghm 11d ago
    > What it's not is God or an independently conscious entity that somehow trumps a thousand years of common law that's built up until now about torts and liability. Agreed, the tendency of people on tech to assume that whatever the most recent thing we've come up with is unprecedented and shouldn't have to follow all of the established patterns we've built up in society for making things safe is wild. I don't know what the next Big Thing will be but I'm pretty confident there will be people claiming it's so different from everything before that we have no choice but to throw out all of the rules for it in the name of progress.
fwip 11d ago
> Is AI less deterministic than an airline dealing with weather? Yes, obviously? The responses of an airline to inclemement weather fit in a reasonably small set of responses, mostly involving rescheduling and/or rerouting flights. The current AI predictability would be like if some airlines decided to do 9/11 when it was raining.
- CPLX 11d ago
  No, it's not. The current so-called scandals about AI hacking into other companies were because a bunch of human beings intentionally configured the software to go and do exactly that thing. There's nothing deterministic about weather, so hopefully you're not just being disingenuous. It's obvious that the global transportation system, or financial markets, or any number of other things are complex adaptive dynamic systems that are on par with AI in terms of their emergent properties. Check my username. It's a concept I spent a lot of my life paying attention to. Just because something has elements of autonomy or is adaptive doesn't make it particularly novel. We've dealt with those kinds of systems for centuries. The solution is to make rules and enforce those rules by whatever means are needed to meet the specifics of the case. The rules, of course, are enforced against human beings.
  - deleted 11d ago
    [deleted]
  - imtringued 11d ago
    >There's nothing deterministic about weather, so hopefully you're not just being disingenuous. You're the one being disingenuous. Look at what you wrote. > Is AI less deterministic than an airline dealing with weather? You didn't talk about how deterministic the weather is. You talked about how an airline responds to a weather event in comparison to AI, which means that it's about responding to presented information by making a decision. The state of the weather does affect your micro decisions, but the rules you follow are the same every time and the rules are as deterministic as possible even if they rely on pilot intuition.
    - 11d ago

by CPLX 12d ago

bayindirh 12d ago

An airline has a weather radar which shows the same thing for the same thing of weather event ahead. So, for similar weather phenomena, radar shows a similar thing. For that thing, procedures and regulations are built. So regulations fit into a well understood phenomena, incl. "return back because that thing is way powerful for us". For the same prompt, an AI model can return two completely different outputs, incl. but not limited to content, length, formatting and tiny details. What you get is a single instance. So, regulating an AI model for safety or any other property is not as easy as regulating air travel. Moreover, you have much stronger motivations for regulating airlines. Otherwise people die in a visible and gruesome way. With AI, it's easy to whitewash problems. Somebody committed suicide? "They were already unstable". AI told something wrong and created problems? "The tech can’t guarantee truth because it's not alive, it can't understand right and wrong". It did something good? "It's probably a sentient being, we shall respect them". I'm for regulating these things. They are dangerous as they are useful (sometimes), but the forces and motivations for regulating it is not the same.

CPLX 12d ago
Of course, it's the same. It's computer software. It's an incredibly powerful business automation tool. It's a lot of things. What it's not is God or an independently conscious entity that somehow trumps a thousand years of common law that's built up until now about torts and liability. Of course, there are some novel issues here that'll pop up here and there, but the idea that this is fundamentally different is propaganda on the part of these AI labs because the more boring, obvious situation doesn't favor them.
- saghm 11d ago
  > What it's not is God or an independently conscious entity that somehow trumps a thousand years of common law that's built up until now about torts and liability. Agreed, the tendency of people on tech to assume that whatever the most recent thing we've come up with is unprecedented and shouldn't have to follow all of the established patterns we've built up in society for making things safe is wild. I don't know what the next Big Thing will be but I'm pretty confident there will be people claiming it's so different from everything before that we have no choice but to throw out all of the rules for it in the name of progress.

fwip 11d ago

> Is AI less deterministic than an airline dealing with weather? Yes, obviously? The responses of an airline to inclemement weather fit in a reasonably small set of responses, mostly involving rescheduling and/or rerouting flights. The current AI predictability would be like if some airlines decided to do 9/11 when it was raining.

CPLX 11d ago
No, it's not. The current so-called scandals about AI hacking into other companies were because a bunch of human beings intentionally configured the software to go and do exactly that thing. There's nothing deterministic about weather, so hopefully you're not just being disingenuous. It's obvious that the global transportation system, or financial markets, or any number of other things are complex adaptive dynamic systems that are on par with AI in terms of their emergent properties. Check my username. It's a concept I spent a lot of my life paying attention to. Just because something has elements of autonomy or is adaptive doesn't make it particularly novel. We've dealt with those kinds of systems for centuries. The solution is to make rules and enforce those rules by whatever means are needed to meet the specifics of the case. The rules, of course, are enforced against human beings.
- deleted 11d ago
  [deleted]
- imtringued 11d ago
  >There's nothing deterministic about weather, so hopefully you're not just being disingenuous. You're the one being disingenuous. Look at what you wrote. > Is AI less deterministic than an airline dealing with weather? You didn't talk about how deterministic the weather is. You talked about how an airline responds to a weather event in comparison to AI, which means that it's about responding to presented information by making a decision. The state of the weather does affect your micro decisions, but the rules you follow are the same every time and the rules are as deterministic as possible even if they rely on pilot intuition.
  - 11d ago