alt Hacker NewsIt’s just impossible.
Look at real-life stuff like laws, company policies, or school rules. Humans have to enforce them, and we constantly see crazy cases in the news. There’s no way simple rules can ever make speech completely 'safe.' I can't prove it with math or logic yet, but I have a feeling that it’ll never happen. Even humans can't do it.
We can run a simple thought experiment here. Say Case A violates rule B, so we add rule C. Then Case D violates rule B but follows rule C, so we add an exception... and it just goes on and on like that forever. It never ends. In the end, you just get a massive pile of rules that makes it impossible to get anything done.
Ultimately, we will have to face the truth that knowledge is dangerous.
Giving knowledge directly to people who cannot actually understand it and allowing them to just use it blindly can be extremely unsafe.
To use a real-world analogy, the problem we are facing with weak AI right now is just like the debate over gun legalization. Do we want to risk the abuse of guns or knowledge just to protect the freedom to own them?
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This is why we have courts and juries. Creating laws that cover all cases and contexts is effectively impossible, so we have humans decide what a fair outcome would be in this specific situation.
> I can't prove it with math or logic yet, but I have a feeling that it’ll never happen.
It's not really that hard to actually prove it with math.
It's a computer, so to produce the boolean result (safe or unsafe) there has to be a mathematical formula. This formula will inherently be extremely complex, but even a very simple formula has a huge problem. Suppose "unsafe" is true if X - Y > 0. Make X and Y themselves as simple or complicated as you like but even in the simplest version it's already impossible to calculate unless the model has perfect information.
You can't calculate "X - Y" if you don't know the value of X. And it's indisputable that there is information it doesn't have. Case in point, telling you about a vulnerability in some piece of code is safe (and indeed not telling you is unsafe) if you're the developer and you want to patch it or an administrator and want to mitigate it, but the opposite if you're the attacker and want to exploit it. The model does not know which one you are, therefore it cannot make the correct determination any more than it can solve one equation with two unknowns.