Comment by keeda | Hacker News Reader

Comment by keeda | Hacker News Reader

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OK, so an AI does something bad and we throw Altman and Dario in jail. Heck, let's throw Elon in, he should be in there anyway, and the rest of the whole bunch just in case.

What about the next incident? Or the ones done by Chinese models, because they sure as heck aren't slowing down? And the thousands of other incidents that will happen as we deploy these things everywhere?

Because this is not happening just now in labs, it's only where they are most visible; this has been happening in the wild from the beginning, starting with the earliest AI-assisted suicides. Which is a perfect example of the problem, because not these CEOs, literally nobody in the world asked for suicide ideation machines. Or the hacks, or any of this other stuff. Yet here we are.

We have to understand: it's not these CEOs that are driving this headlong mad dash towards more powerful models. It's a force of economics. There is just too much money to be made. If we dispose of these people, there will just be somebody else doing exactly the same thing because the incentives as they exist today all force that outcome. This is why they're asking for regulation, or "urging us to urge them to stop."

Holding CEOs accountable certainly would feel good and may even be justified, but it's like putting a band-aid on a cancer; it does nothing to change the underlying cause.

The underlying cause is exactly those people who make the rules not being responsible for the negative effects they cause?

"CEOs" are perhaps only the lowest rung of those. That doesn't mean the idea of "nobody is responsible" was anything other but learned helplessness.

Corporations have to be held accountable for their actions. Pretending, that was impossible is a weird kind of defeatism that only serves a very small elite.

I'm not saying nobody is responsible, I'm saying this line of thought is ineffective because it does nothing to solve the underlying problem. Holding corporations accountable here will simply push these efforts to other countries, who, to put it mildly, are even less aligned with the US than these CEOs are.

If this law was passed and federal enforcement was credible, the labs would basically shut down the next day and would dramatically reshape their offerings before reopening. The CEO would not accept the risk they pose to our society, if they bore it themselves.

All these comments ignore the elephants in the room I already called out: who's going to enforce these laws in China? Or Russia?

And which government is going to enforce these laws here to let their geopolitical adversaries have the upper hand?

And what about the models already out there that with minor tweaks are equally capable of substantial damage?

And what do these laws do to remove the trillion-dollar incentive to produce models that will replace all knowledge work? The one thing economics teaches us is that incentives are an inexorable force, like laws of nature, and this is the biggest incentive of all. Which is why I called this a "force of economics."

If suppressed here this effort will only migrate to other countries who are desperate to get in on the AI game and are even less aligned with the US than these CEOs.

This, like nukes, is going to take international collaboration on careful regulations, else it's not going to work at all.

Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Saying having zero accountability is the same as having some does not help.

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