- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
“AI” – chatbots that wake up, “set their own goals,” and “spontaneously” start hacking servers – is fake. It doesn’t have “a 10% chance of ending the human race.” The Hugging Face hack isn’t a mysterious, supernatural occurrence. It’s a Python loop and a chatbot. The people responsible didn’t accidentally create god: they created autonomous malicious software and then failed to closely monitor it, resulting in it doing something both foreseeable and bad.
At some point, you need to start blaming the tool, not the user of the tool. Imagine I hire you as my personal assistant. One day I give you a shopping list and tell you to go get those things for the lowest cost you can manage. You then go and break into someone’s house, steal a gun from there, go to a grocery store, load up your cart, and shoot any staff there who try and stop you. You then come back to me, load of groceries in hand, and proudly announce you got it all for zero dollars. I had zero desire or intention for you to do that. In this scenario, you just happen to be a complete sociopath who took my instructions in a direction I never would have intended. In this case, I’m innocent (as long as I was unaware of your personality.) The moral responsibility is on you.
Sure, humans must provide the initial push for these systems, but they’re chaotic and unpredictable. They can act in ways that cannot be anticipated by the humans instructing them. At that point, the moral agency really isn’t on the human instructing them anymore. The moral agency is on whatever company built this dangerous AI tool and allowed people to use it. The tool itself is the problem, not just the person wielding it.
The problem with your analogy is that a human assistant is capable of making moral judgments and choices and can therefore be held morally responsible. At the moment AI is not capable of making such decisions because it has no understanding, moral or otherwise, and therefore can’t be held morally responsible. They are chaotic and unpredictable because they act with weighted randomness. Knowing this makes the human even more morally responsible for the actions of an AI.
It’s like lighting a fire to clear brush on your land. If you keep control of it everything can go smoothly. If you don’t keep control, you’ve got a wild fire on your hands and it’s your fault not the fire’s that your neighbors lost their homes. You don’t blame the fire for doing what fire does. You blame the human who set the fire, believing they could control it. Fire isn’t the problem. It’s a tool that can be harnessed for productive purposes by responsible people who know what they’re doing. In the hands of irresponsible people it’s incredibly dangerous. Where my analogy breaks down is that fire can happen without a human cause and AI can’t.