Hacker News Reader

Comment by recursive | Hacker News Reader

> Someone is in charge and is responsible.

This doesn't seem to be a given.

There's always a CEO or a president. The buck always stops somewhere. Somebody is always making the big bucks because they are in charge.

For legally incorporated companies. What if it's just a crypto wallet hooked up to a network of prompts? Are you sure a human must have created it?

Somebody is collecting those funds. Someone wrote those prompts. There's always a human to blame somewhere.

I'm not aware of any counter-example, but I also don't know any reason why this must be true. And furthermore, I would expect that this will get more likely over time.

It's possible, in theory, that an AI could establish a crypto wallet, but what would they do with it? AI doesn't have desires. It doesn't do what it isn't told to do (although those instructions can be broad and vague). Even if an AI did somehow do something bad without being told, that AI would still be set up by a human and running on some human's hardware and using a human's internet connection.

Maybe in the distant sci-fi future we'll have actual AI (not just glorified chatbots) and AI will be able to decide for itself what it wants to do with its time and we'll be allowing AI to sign leases on property and set up accounts with utility companies, and if that day comes we're going to have a lot of problems if we're not ready for it, but until then it's AI on a human's hardware at a human's property running up a human's electric bill.

I'm sure you can pay for hosting somewhere without being a human.

It won't need to sign a lease to do any of this. It doesn't even require desires. I'm not sure why it seems so far fetched to you.

I have a copy of the weights on my HD and to my knowledge, it hasn't spontaneously went out and acquired web hosting and stood up a web site.

That doesn't seem to be something any AI company says is currently possible.

If things change, and AI becomes able to act on its own initiative, then it will be easy to change this law

I think it's just a gap in definitions. The labs say models don't act on their own initiative. What counts as initiative? I guess an API call in a for loop would count.

Historically it seems like a lot of laws haven't been easy to change. Especially when they regulate zillion dollar industries.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com