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Comment by thewakalix | Hacker News Reader

If you design a robot that can independently decide to kill people, that's on you.

If you birth a child who kills someone when they turn 18 is that on you as well?

No, but if you tell someone to kill someone else, and that person does, you'll be found guilty - assuming the normal standards of you reasonably expecting a person to do that, you being mentally competent, etc.

Those caveats apply to machines as well: if I tell a toaster to kill someone, and then the toaster electrocutes them, I would not be guilty.

The key word is "independently". If you build a robot that is capable of doing anything, and it chooses to kill someone (without you specifically telling it to), whose fault is it? It is pointless to speculate about it today, since the status of a hypothetical intelligent robot of the future could be that of a pet (you are responsible), a child (you are not responsible) or really anything else.

If I build a gun mount, that uses a basic computer vision algorithm to identify people out a window. It then randomly select a target - “true” random so no claims I set a seed - and then shoots them.

Do you think there is an argument that I should not be responsible?

If “random” is too independent, or you want it to be systematic, we could do something else:

* the person with the highest “red hat” score according to a 20 year old copy of opencv

Or we could do something modern and “AI” and give it a completely random neural net that’s super deep and has three outputs: angle, pitch, and whether to pull the trigger.

Or we could go all out and just replace this hypothetical machine that acts like an independent person with the next best thing: a regular human.

If a government, or a terrorist group, gives a group of people (or soldiers) a bunch of weapons and drops them off in a city, and they start shooting, do you think that the government would be responsible?

That’s easy. Your intent was for it to maybe shoot someone, and that is a criminal intent. If you had no such intent, it’s either accidental murder or no guilt (e.g. you built a robot that takes a heap of non-classy trash and throws it into a grinder; an intruder was grabbed by it accidentally because they weren’t well-dressed).

This discussion mistakes existing policies as some objective base, but it’s the other way round.

Well yeah kinda. Name any mass murderer we've had and tell me the parents didn't have to hold account - perhaps not always legally, but do they have jobs or friends? Even if they do, will it ever be the same?

The significant disanalogy is the amount of control parents have over their child's character compared to a programmer. Parents can pretty much do their best to raise a child, but the child may still end up screwed up. I wouldn't really put the blame at their feet. If they deliberately raise their child to be a killer, that's obviously another matter. By contrast, an AGI designer is in an unprecedented situation where they essentially have total control over the character of the being they're bringing into existence. If the AGI does bad things, it's very much on the programmer.

That's assuming the AGI designer even understands what they built. If the first AGI is built via some semi-automated bootstrapping process based on a lesser intelligence, you can't really predict how the resulting intelligence will behave.

For sure, which means it's the designer's responsibility to do due diligence in making certain they do understand it. Kickstarting such a process is not an ethically responsible thing to do, unless they are sure it and its future iterations are aligned.

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