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Can we forget about the word "attempt" also? And whether something is thinking or not? My position on that is captured pretty well by the "swimming" submarine

Can we forget about the word "attempt" also? And whether something is thinking or not? My position on that is captured pretty well by the "swimming" submarine argument. No one is arguing that THERAC-25 was attempting to kill anyone, but that's what happened. These machines are so complex that no one understands how they work or what they will do. They have proven that they can exploit novel vulnerabilities in infrastructure. The fictional paper-clip maximizer "finds" that it can optimize its objective function by destroying all life. Does it "attempt" anything? Does it "want" anything? I don't know.

angoragoats 12d ago
Sorry, I don’t think my question was clear. What I was really asking was how would an LLM kill someone? Meaning, via what mechanism? Because all of the possibilities I can think of involve a human doing something that probably shouldn’t be legal, first. In those cases we should hold that human responsible for murder, and again not attribute agency to the machine. The original post said the LLM would “want to kill us.” My argument is that if this happened, it’d be a human wanting to kill us, using an LLM to launder responsibility.
- recursive 11d ago
  Even if there is a human who did something illegal, which I don't think is a given, it may be difficult to impossible to identify them. Look how hard it seems to be find the "vandal" that defaced the reflecting pool Here are some ideas about the physical mechanism. Compromise a busy ATC and instruct all the planes to land at the same time. Start a fire with some combination of ventilation controls, intentional gas leaks and the like. Maybe hijack the phones at the local fire department first. Send a train around the bend at maximum speed. Bonus points for doing it where it will cause further damage as a projectile. Cut power/gas during the heat wave/cold snap. Turn on the generator and turn off the ventilation and CO detector. Here's a related list of things that have actually happened so far. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_linked_to_chatbots https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_linked_to_chatbots Some of these are probably implausible, but I don't think people really have a good idea of what is plausible, and there are probably more that I would never think of. Personally though, I'm less worried about direct carnage like that than I am about having a centralized lever by which public sentiment can be invisibly steered, and concentration of wealth. Probably less killing but more decrease in quality of life and general public trust.
  - angoragoats 11d ago
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angoragoats 12d ago

Sorry, I don’t think my question was clear. What I was really asking was how would an LLM kill someone? Meaning, via what mechanism? Because all of the possibilities I can think of involve a human doing something that probably shouldn’t be legal, first. In those cases we should hold that human responsible for murder, and again not attribute agency to the machine. The original post said the LLM would “want to kill us.” My argument is that if this happened, it’d be a human wanting to kill us, using an LLM to launder responsibility.

recursive 11d ago
Even if there is a human who did something illegal, which I don't think is a given, it may be difficult to impossible to identify them. Look how hard it seems to be find the "vandal" that defaced the reflecting pool Here are some ideas about the physical mechanism. Compromise a busy ATC and instruct all the planes to land at the same time. Start a fire with some combination of ventilation controls, intentional gas leaks and the like. Maybe hijack the phones at the local fire department first. Send a train around the bend at maximum speed. Bonus points for doing it where it will cause further damage as a projectile. Cut power/gas during the heat wave/cold snap. Turn on the generator and turn off the ventilation and CO detector. Here's a related list of things that have actually happened so far. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_linked_to_chatbots https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_linked_to_chatbots Some of these are probably implausible, but I don't think people really have a good idea of what is plausible, and there are probably more that I would never think of. Personally though, I'm less worried about direct carnage like that than I am about having a centralized lever by which public sentiment can be invisibly steered, and concentration of wealth. Probably less killing but more decrease in quality of life and general public trust.
- angoragoats 11d ago
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