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Comment by bluegatty | Hacker News Reader

No ... there is no need for 'escaped containment', there are no 'agents'.

That's just jargon.

It's just software

We have all the laws we need.

If some company ended up doing some horrible thing, we would not say 'companies software exposed 1 Million identities'.

We would say 'ABC Corp. exposed 1 Million entities'.

There is no 'agent'.

ABC Corp 'did it' ... or the individual in the org 'did it'.

The 'gun' did not 'shoot' the other man; we say 'a man shot another man'.

That's it.

And yes, Dr. Bengio is bit odd with all of this.

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Note that we already already apply this principle not only to software, but also to some sentient beings.

If your dog kills someone, you are accused of murder.

[at least, in the jurisdiction where I live]

If your dog gets this treatment, why not your AI?

This goes all the way back to Old France

There was a sow in Falaise in northern France that killed a kid in 1386. The town dressed the pig in a bonnet and hanged it after sentencing the pig itself and not its owner

But… maybe that’s just medieval nonsense

I mean I think there’s a similar level of judgement required.

Was the owner negligent in controlling their pig/dog/AI?

Was anyone else negligent along the way?

For example if the pig was just a normal pig, the owner cared for them normally, and there was a freak accident where the pig escaped and happened to kill a kid? Obviously nobody at fault.

If you have a dog with a history of violence and let it walk around off-leash with you around town, and it kills a kid? Absolutely the dog owner was negligent and should be charged.

Did you buy an AI sold to you as secure and the provider implies that it’s in a sandbox? Provider is on the hook for the damage.

And this is where your analogy breaks down, because there are few natural analogues for the sorts of systems we are developing.

Too generous. CEO Of $CORP caused millions of innocent people's lives to be damaged

I'm inclined to want to agree ... but that's not how it works with limited liability corps.

At least we have laws for what OpenAI 'does' to others, in whatever form.

We can report it however we want regardless of how it may or may not be prosecuted

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