Hacker News Reader

Comment by hnarn | Hacker News Reader

Sure, it's funny, but stealing is still illegal. In legal terms the technicalities of how you stole something is irrelevant. Self-scanning services in grocery stores, for example, are everywhere in my country; but willfully not scanning an item and taking it out of the store doesn't stop it being shoplifting just because you didn't hide the item from a human being behind a register on the way out.

View on HN

An interesting thought experiment on that: if you convinced (non-violently, non-coercively) a shop keeper to give you something for free that wouldn't be stealing. At what point does doing the same with an AI till become the same thing?

The shop is giving the AI authority to run the transaction, if it permits something is that the shop also agreeing?

The transaction is fundamentally between a human client and a corporation. With an AI shopkeeper or with a human, it doesn't matter - you don't steal from the till attendants, you steal from the corporation.

A human cashier makes a mistake and doesn’t ring up an item? They’ll get reprimanded.

An AI cashier does the same and all of a sudden it’s the fault of the human and is liable for prosecution. You should know better than to steal.

Businesses looking to replace people with this can’t have it both ways.

There's a scam where two people go into a store and pretend not to know each other. One gets change from the other, but doesn't have the correct change. They then get the cashier involved to help with the "problem" by making change from the register till. But, via a fast-past set of confusing operations, trick the cashier into giving incorrect change. It's still considered stealing if you intentionally trick the cashier into giving you incorrect change.

I like as well to remind people that law is there too. Law is like the ultimate border of information systems. Sometimes it's too hard or cumbersome to implement a security procedure to prevent a behavior, but the law is there anyway. It's kind of reparation versus prevention, but it's there anyways, and it's enough for many use cases.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com