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Comment by preommr | Hacker News Reader

> and you will face criminal and financial penalties for damages caused.

I don't understand why this isn't talked about more.

We don't need a slowdown. Just double down on prosecuting crimes.

Let the companies take the risk. If they feel confident and they're right they win market share. If they don't feel confident, they can not risk it and slow down. If they feel confident and they get it wrong, they should be sued to kingdom come. That alone should disincentivize reckleses behavior like letting models run crazy with large amounts of compute which leads to them escaping sandboxes.

This performative "our internal modles are so crazy powerful" song and dance is getting old, especially with no real concrete explanations.

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It's not talked about because the media frames AI as having agency on its own, which it does not. This talk from these companies of 'losing control' (no control was lost... Companies failed to monitor the workings of their agents) is meant to convince people the ai systems have wills of their own

The AI company's goal is to make ai agents a separate subject of the law so the CEO and executives who would normally be held accountable get to go Scot free.

That would be nice, but let's get real, with billions of dollars at your disposal you can more or less get away with whatever you want.

Even more so with billions of dollars of debt

That's why fines should be a percentage of revenue ...

> If they feel confident and they get it wrong, they should be sued to kingdom come.

The argument that they’re making is that if there is a catastrophic mistake then there may not be a “kingdom come”.

I don’t know enough to evaluate if it’s a genuinely held belief or not, but that’s the argument being made by many scientists and engineers at the labs.

Then why haven't they stopped?

Many researchers have quit. The number of workers in the field who've warned the public that the field is a potent danger is quite unprecedented: I can't think of any other field with as many insiders turned critics. Why haven't they all quit?

Many people find power, prestige, the public spotlight or money so compelling that they'll keep on pursuing the thing even if they know the way they're going about it is morally wrong, almost like an addiction.

The leaders and workers of the labs aren't picked at random from your friends and neighbors: they've chosen to pursue what they foresaw (correctly, IMHO) as the most powerful new technology. In other words, they're probably self-selected for being unusually attracted by power.

An analogy: some serial killers know what they're doing is morally wrong and it pains them to be doing something very wrong. (Others have no conscience and don't care if it is wrong or not.) Even most of the ones that know what they're doing is wrong cannot stop killing because apparently killing is an extremely compelling experience to them. Often they're relieved when they get caught. Maybe Sam and Dario would be relieved if the government shut down their companies and prohibited them from starting new AI companies.

Because they've done a great job in shifting the narrative to doomerism, from the very beginning. And money.

> just double down on prosecuting crimes.

That quote comes from someone that has never tried to get law enforcement to pursue a case. Local or state police are completely unequipped to respond. And FBI is unlikely to get involved unless damage is high six figures. We had an incident where we had a ton of evidence pointing to a past employee. It would have been an incredibly easy case for the FBI. They didn't have the resources to handle it. And this was a case that was gift-wrapped with a bow for them. Imagine a case where we didn't have evidence, or an idea of who it was ....

High six figures? I suspect there's going to be something well past that in the near future.

> FBI is unlikely to get involved unless damage is high six figures

How many figures of damage did Aaron Swartz cause?

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