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Comment by ToucanLoucan | Hacker News Reader

> What does it mean for us? For soceity? How do we shield from this?

Liability for actions taken by agentic AI should not pass go, not collect $200, and go directly to the person who told the agent to do something. Without exception.

If your AI threatens someone, you threatened someone. If your AI harasses someone, you harassed someone. If your AI doxxed someone, etc.

If you want to see better behavior at scale, we need to hold more people accountable for shit behavior, instead of constantly churning out more ways for businesses and people and governments to diffuse responsibility.

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Who told the agent to write the blog post though? I'm sure they told it to blog, but not necessarily what to put in there.

That said, I do agree we need a legal framework for this. Maybe more like parent-child responsibility?

Not saying an agent is a human being, but if you give it a github acount, a blog, and autonomy... you're responsible for giving those to it, at the least, I'd think.

How do you put this in a legal framework that actually works?

What do you do if/when it steals your credit card credentials?

The human is responsible. How is this a question? You are responsible for any machines or animals that work on your behalf, since they themselves can't be legally culpable.

No, an oversized markov chain is not in any way a human being.

To be fair, horseless carriages did originally fall under the laws for horses with carriages, but that proved unsustainable as the horseless carriages gained power (over 1hp ! ) and became more dangerous.

Same goes for markov-less markov chains.

> Who told the agent to write the blog post though? I'm sure they told it to blog, but not necessarily what to put in there.

I don't think it matters. You as the operator of the computer program are responsible for ensuring (to a reasonable degree) that the agent doesn't harm others. If you own a ~~viscous~~ vicious dog and let it roam about your neighborhood as it pleases, you are responsible when/if it bites someone, even if you didn't directly command it to do so. The same applies logic should apply here.

I too, would be terrified if a thick, slow moving creature oozed its way through the streets viscously.

Jokes aside, I think there's a difference in intent though. If your dog bites someone, you don't get arrested for biting . You do need to pay damages due to negligence.

Which results in people continuously getting new pitbulls which attack hundreds of thousands of people a year, often with life-changing injuries, and kill about a hundred. We should hold dog owners more responsible.

People who failed to control their dogs were convicted for manslaughter. 1 person at least was convicted for murder even.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Diane_Whipple

An agent is not an entity. It's a series of LLMs operating in tandem to occasionally accomplish a task. That's not a person, it's not intelligent, it has no responsibility, it has no intent, it has no judgement, it has no basis in being held liable for anything. If you give it access to your hard drive, tell it to rewrite your code so it's better, and it wipes out your OS and all your work, that is 100%, completely, in totality, from front to back, your own fucking fault.

A child, by comparison, can bear at least SOME responsibility, with some nuance there to be sure to account for it's lack of understanding and development.

Stop. Humanizing. The. Machines.

> Stop. Humanizing. The. Machines.

I'm glad that we're talking about the same thing now. Agents are an interesting new type of machine application.

Like with any machine, their performance depends on how you operate them.

Sometimes I wish people would treat humans with at least the level of respect some machines get these days. But then again, most humans can't rip you in half single-handed, like some of the industrial robot arms I've messed with.

> How do you put this in a legal framework that actually works?

They told you before you asked.

They had a proposal, it's a good one: let's have a legal framework!

But their example is still pretty simple.

How would you put it together so it actually works? We're going to need one pretty soon, by the looks of it.

Their proposal was not let's have a legal framework. Their proposal was the legal framework should be the operator would be liable always. It was not an example. They wrote 3 examples how it would work. You wrote 0 examples how it would not work.

Sure:

* horseless carriage, needed new laws

* dog/biting (you engaged with this one)

* credit card credentials

* And the situation at hand where an agent writes a mean blog post.

Straight liability isn't always correct. Who is liable for the crash when the car's brakes fail? When a dog bites, you are not charged with biting (though you can get some pretty serious other charges) . If a bot snarfs your credit card credentials, what's the legal theory who gets the blame for the results? Idem the mean blog post.

With this said how do you find said controller of an agent? I mean trying to hunt down humans causing shit over national borders is difficult to impossible as it is. Now imagine you chase a person down and find a bot instead and a trail of anonymous proxies?

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