Andrew Cullen:
[…] if a human asks an AI agent to gather health statistics, and the agent hacks a government server to do so, the human could lack the deliberate intent required for a conviction. The AI agent, meanwhile, lacks the legal personhood to be charged, as well as human intentionality.
Current Australia laws effectively treat AI actions as if they are something that just happens to us – like a severe weather event. This shows a glaring loophole in our legal system that does not hold those who make, maintain and use these systems to account when something goes wrong.
I don’t think that’s relevant, though. Like this entire sentience/super-intelligence debate that everyone seems so captured by, particularly in the wake of the Amodei letter and renewed calls for regulation and cooperation, is missing the point that the existing models are already being created in a way that prevents the creators from fully understanding what they’re creating or how to control it (because of the pace at which they’re operating). It’s already unsafe and is already causing real world harms.
It really frustrates me that the response to Anthropic, OpenAI and X calling for regulation publicly, or the first high profile security breaches, is corporate conspiracy theories and semantics about how we should classify/characterise the technology. People seem more interested in having their little debate bro moments online than actually getting together and agreeing that we should do something about the real and current problems.
I do think it’s relevant / I think we’re arguing the same point from different ends. I’m simply underlining the idea that this whole shooting match isn’t AGI and that we should push back on that framing, before we solve the wrong problem in the wrong way.
It’s still dangerous, but semantic games of gotcha are not what needs to happen.
I’d certainly agree that the way in which the AI companies frame the problems (i.e. Skynet will kill us all) is not really helping. I guess it gets more people talking about the problems, but that runs the risk of escalating things in the wrong direction if the framing is wrong.