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Comment by sbelskie | Hacker News Reader

This seems like a questionable idea for all the obvious reasons, but I don’t really get the argument that it should be illegal. I don’t really understand how you would craft such a law. Someone can run for office and declare that they will make decisions based on horoscopes, tarot cards, oomancy etc. All bad ideas but obviously legal.

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The concept of agency is tied to the concept of responsibility + liability.

A big reason why we even have someone at the top is so we have a finger to point when something goes wrong.

I assume in this case you point at the idiot who said this was a good idea?

The elected candidate, who is a human, would clearly be responsible for whatever actions are taken, no?

You'd be surprised, I'm sure a human that is proposing this, and is in politics, would do everything in their power to shed responsibility for bad actions and take responsibility for all the good stuff. Tangentially related is the question of who is responsible in an accident when the at fault driver is AI. Is it the engineer, is it the CEO? So if a bot is running the government, same thing...

That's different because chatgpt's terms of use includes this in all caps:

YOU ACCEPT AND AGREE THAT ANY USE OF OUTPUTS FROM OUR SERVICE IS AT YOUR SOLE RISK AND YOU WILL NOT RELY ON OUTPUT AS A SOLE SOURCE OF TRUTH OR FACTUAL INFORMATION, OR AS A SUBSTITUTE FOR PROFESSIONAL ADVICE.

Waymo, on the other hand, has liability insurance for every single one of their cars, and apparently they get a pretty good rate for their size because they have fewer accidents per car than the average person. The concept of fault is a bit different for them than for a single person. They would have to develop a pattern of systemic failures, rather than an isolated incident, before real questions of liability arise.

I didn't specifically call out ChatGPT so those ToS do not apply here. The government can either create their own model, or not disclose who they are using, in which case they can generally blame AI for misleading the people. We live in a world where deep fakes are being promoted by Elon Musk in a very global way, and people are eating it up, despite it being against platform of choice terms of service. So if you think that a ToS sentence will stop people in power from abusing AI, I would redo that mental experiment.

> You'd be surprised, I'm sure a human that is proposing this, and is in politics, would do everything in their power to shed responsibility for bad actions and take responsibility for all the good stuff.

I'm from the UK, my best example of this is from 2001, when the Conservative Party started running campaign posters saying "You paid the tax so where are the trains?" despite being responsible for the privatisation of the trains before they lost power.

https://www.alamy.com/one-of-posters-from-the-conservative-p...

https://archives.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/repositories/2/archival_o...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privatisation_of_British_Rail

It might run into legal trouble because whoever or whatever is making the decisions needs to be given access to sensitive information. This was apparently[0] what led to the impeachment of Park Geun-hye in South Korea.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_South_Korean_political_sc...

"You're electing me to not do my job, but to hand it over to something else" is... probably not illegal for someone to say. It might be illegal for them to do, though - dereliction or some such.

Existing laws should prevent the mayor from delegating authority that they don’t have the authority to delegate.

They may choose to base their decisions upon the AI, but they will (should) still be ultimately accountable for choosing to implement the AI’s “guidance”.

AI can’t be elected mayor, so the person elected will be the one accountable for their actions regardless of who or how they are suggested.

I feel like "I'll tell an AI the decisions I have to make and do whatever it tells me" doesn't meaningfully change the outcome but bypasses the legality question.

My point is that it shouldn’t matter how the mayor (or whomever) makes their decisions. The accountability for implementing those choices rests with them and “AI told me to” is no more a defense than “a crazy guy on the street told me to”.

There’s no need for any law about letting AI run the show because legally the AI is never running the show, the mayor is, regardless of whether they use AI, chicken bones, or a team of competent advisors to help them make decisions.

It’s no different than an elected official using their faith to guide decisions, they’re still accountable, not god.

Oh, yes, definitely agreed there. I can't get to the article, so I don't know if he's doing it to abdicate responsibility.

Also, many (most?) of today's politicians govern deterministically already. You can safely predict their positions on 90+% of issues by simply looking at their political party. We're already governed by algorithm--just with a human mouth speaking the words and a human hand signing with the pen.

> You can safely predict their positions on 90+% of issues

That’s not deterministic. Also I’m not going to get into a debate on free will and determinism.

How is this so different from committing to making decisions based on metrics? Or delegating policy to subordinates? Dereliction is defined as a failure to fulfill an obligation. This candidate, if elected, would still be fulfilling obligations...just through unusual means.

The more you try to work backwards from "I want to figure out how to make this illegal" you realize you get a lot of valid means of governing in the crossfire.

There was a guy in San Antonio that ran for an office he felt should be eliminated. He was successful won the election and eliminated the office (had the city counsel vote to eliminate it). AI might not, at this point (and likely never) be a good thing to turn over city government to. This might be an interesting project to watch.

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