Hacker News Reader

Comment by perching_aix | Hacker News Reader

Alternatively, my opinion is that computers should make all management decisions exactly because of this. Too many times does decisionmaking devolve into fingerpointing and political power struggles. I strongly believe the only way out of this is exactly through AI. It will also provide a long overdue reset to our compass on what accountability means and can mean.

View on HN

Maybe if the AI is impartial. But who trains the AI? Who guarantees it has no biases, implicit (because it's trained on how things work today, which is maybe not what we want) or explicitly planted there (because of political plans of AI owners or other external influence)?

Well, people keep riding the AGI train, no? Surely a superintelligence should be able to overcome its own biases, right? If there's any bar I'd pose for an intelligence to be "super", this would definitely be one of them. Even with regular humans, being open minded, willing to critically rethink their own stance, and being open for discussions is generally regarded as a sign of intelligence, after all.

Your post might have been tongue in cheek, but assuming it's not: the issue with ceding decision making to a superintelligence is that we'll likely lose the ability to reason about it's decisions and we'll struggle to take back control if it starts making choices we don't like. It's reasoning is far beyond our own capabilities after all.

It's half tongue-in-cheek. That being said, the larger picture behind the decisionmaking of our human leaders is also essentially uncheckable, and is often a key part of many conspiracy theories as a result.

Many (maybe most) humans are not even aware of their own biases, though they are supposed to have "general" intelligence. When they are aware, sometimes they use various psychological strategies to live with them or justify them instead of trying to overcome them. So the AGI in question must be "better" than most humans in this sense.

Plus, there's the question about who would control that AGI. If it's a black box in the hands of a company, how can I know for sure that the AGI has no secret plan implanted by the company or by some government?

Do you want LLMs that monitor your work as if you are an Amazon factory worker... and then one day you wake up in a Cube that you helped design.

Pretty sure I'm already extensively monitored at work, and so are most people, so I'm not sure that'd be new.

In the days when Sussman was a novice, Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-6.

"What are you doing?", asked Minsky.

"I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-tac-toe", Sussman replied.

"Why is the net wired randomly?", asked Minsky.

"I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play", Sussman said.

Minsky then shut his eyes.

"Why do you close your eyes?" Sussman asked his teacher.

"So that the room will be empty."

At that moment, Sussman was enlightened.

Unfortunately I was not enlightened by this.

Explanation: <https://simple.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hacker_koan&o...>

Not what I expected, I guess that's an important observation to make as well.

Based on exactly what should the computers make management decisions?

Reports filed by humans? Or meaningless automated metrics?

The same data available to current human managers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com