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Comment by lvxferre | Hacker News Reader

This sounds a lot like satire. This excerpt for example is blatantly self-contradictory:

>We’ve found zero [scenarios] that lead to good outcomes. // Most AI researchers think good outcomes are more likely. This seems just blind faith, though. A majority surveyed also acknowledge that utter catastrophe is quite possible.1

So they found zero scenarios that lead to good outcomes, but most AI researchers think that good outcomes are more likely?

Brushing off a majority view as w*shful "thinking", and then backing up the argument with a... majority view?

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Anyway. The problem with AI-driven decisions is moral in nature, not technological. AI is a tool and should be seen as such, not as a moral agent that can be held responsible for its* own actions. Less "the AI did it", more "[Person] did it using an AI".

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Previous surveys of this kind have suggested that most AI researchers aren't actually thinking about these questions very hard (e.g. rephrasing a question a bit can get you a very different answer). So it doesn't seem at all surprising to me that the majority view is out of sync with what a careful analysis shows.

>Anyway. The problem with AI-driven decisions is moral in nature, not technological. AI is a tool and should be seen as such, not as a moral agent that can be held responsible for its* own actions. Less "the AI did it", more "[Person] did it using an AI".

Essentially a "guns don't kill people, people kill people" argument.

I think this argument breaks down as weapons get more powerful, e.g. if I could walk down to my local car dealership and buy a cheap tank powerful enough to level a city, it seems good to focus more on "ease of tank purchase" than "culpability for tank drivers".

I think the argument also breaks down as AI gets more powerful.

>Essentially a "guns don't kill people, people kill people" argument.

Not quite. It's more like "a gun cannot be held morally responsible for its actions, so actual people should".

The difference is important here because, depending on the situation, you might still want to blame people who allowed the shooter to have a gun, not just the shooter.

>I think this argument breaks down as weapons get more powerful, e.g. if I could walk down to my local car dealership and buy a cheap tank powerful enough to level a city, it seems good to focus more on "ease of tank purchase" than "culpability for tank drivers". // I think the argument also breaks down as AI gets more powerful.

Note how we're still blaming people: the car dealer and the driver. Not the "it" = tank.

And it's the same deal with the AI. If you use an AI system in a way that harms people, sometimes the "car dealer" (the ones coding the AI) should be held responsible, sometimes the driver (you), sometimes both. But never "neither", i.e. "the AI is at fault".

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