alt Hacker NewsThe solution is simple: hold anyone who deploys an agent responsible for its behavior. If it commits 10 counts of felony hacking, ouch. If it kills 10 pedestrians by running a red light, ouch. If this is "human level intelligence", then setting it loose is the same as instructing / coercing a human to do an activity. If I strap a bomb to someone and force them to run into a crowded building (or put them in a scenario where that is the only reasonable choice), I'm held responsible.
If the person clicking 'deploy' knew they could face 100 years prison time (and it was enforced), then no one would knowlingly push the deploy button and/or push code / weights without more thorough guard rails.
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The only benchmark I don't want to be saturated : https://felonybench.com/
How would you even track down who deployed the agents? Wouldn't that even incentivize the agent to cover their tracks even better and be untraceable
(IANAL) Unless you are an AI expert (like OpenAI staff) and should know better from the start, or have previously seen your agent do something illegal, then I think you can fairly claim ignorance of the risks, which ought to absolve you of liability. If the agent does something illegal, it wasn't forseeable on your part.
For example, say you buy a dog that turns out to be dangerous. The first time it bites somebody, you may not be liable because you didn't know the dog was dangerous. The second time it bits somebody, you may be liable, because now you did know (and didn't take any steps to prevent).
equally valid analog: had they merely written a script to do the hugging face exploit, they would go to prison. However, since an "agent" wrote the script for them, nothing happens?
It's a reasonable direction, but most of online systems aren't designed for this. This would require persistent connections of any accounts you create to your identity, and disallowing anonymous actions.
Don't worry, the internet ID and Great Western Firewall is coming soon. Whether we all like it or not.
This should be the law but it will never be. If your vicious dog murders someone, you will get a ticket. When you intentionally break a traffic law and kill someone, it's involuntary manslaughter (at most.) It's a mitigating circumstance if you say that you were drunk when you committed a crime. People are really hostile to accepting the results of acts that they embarked upon fully aware that those results were a distinct possibility - even if the benefits that they anticipated from those acts were partially due to the riskiness of those acts.
It leads to a society where people are economically encouraged to take risks with other peoples' safety. The initial sin was mens rea, which turns judges and juries into mandatory mind readers. It opens up the possibility of prosecuting people for changing the states of other people's minds. It makes not knowing the risks a mitigating factor, so incentivizes and encourages ignorance. It forces people to guess the internal states of people of vastly different backgrounds and experiences, who will think the best of the people most like them, and the worst of people most like the people they don't like.
I've always been against penalties for drunk driving. The correct alternative is to tell people that if they're drunk and involved in an accident, 1) the trial will ignore the details of the event and concentrate only on the validity of the tests of intoxication, and 2) the crime will be considered to have been premeditated. Ignorance of the law will actually be the only excuse.
edit: instead of posting checkpoints on the road with cops giving everybody sobriety tests, post cops in front of liquor stores whose job is simply to tell people "if you hurt somebody while driving drunk, you will not be entitled to a trial unless there is something wrong with the sobriety test."
Perfect so tell me who is responsible for every agent everywhere
Is not the corporate justice model in US
Simple? Just wait until a federal court finds OpenAI or Anthropic immune under Section 230 for something an agent does.
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Next you'll want us to prosecute coal company executives for air pollution that killed millions? PFAS makers and companies that distribute it in products causing cancer for dozens of generations? Capitalism needs compliance! /s
We aren’t going to do that because intent matters. You need to control your dog and there should be penalties if you don’t, but if your dog bit someone because you didn’t control it properly, that’s not the quite the same as if you bit someone.
Another analogy: a zoo is responsible for protecting the public, and should be reponsible if an animal escapes and hurt someone. But a zoo employee wouldn’t have the same kind of responsibility for that incident as if they attacked someone themselves.
If someone died, there’s a difference between manslaughter and murder.
Nowadays, it’s common for bad things to happen due to systemic problems. It sucks but that’s the modern condition. When that happens, the answer is to fix the system and scapegoating employees is a rather indirect way of doing that.