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by ludbb 3466 days ago
And I thought I was pessimistic. I must be missing something, how did we go from a faulty code, to KPIs, to Comcast paving the future of the AI?
2 comments

> how did we go from a faulty code

The code in the example isn't faulty. The goals are faulty in an non-obvious way, and drives the AI to optimize a solution to a fitness function in a way that humans might consider pathological behavior.

> to Comcast paving the future of the AI?

Comcast's goals are faulty in a non-obvious way. Comcast's goals are to maximize shareholder profit, and in doing so creates a culture of fraudulent billing and a horrifying gauntlet of a cancellation process that humans might consider pathological behavior. And AI is the next logical step to optimizing those corporate values.

> Comcast's goals are to maximize shareholder profit

It's nitpicking, but no, no big company has the goal of maximizing shareholder profit.

Most have the goal of maximizing board members profit, what is mostly aligned, but different in a non-obvious way from maximizing shareholder profit.

> Comcast paving the future of the AI?

I think the core point is that corporations are fairly general-purpose machines, designed to do things too "big" for individual people. (But smaller and easier to analyze than "civilization.")

Their hardware stack is different, but lessons about their computational structure and design pitfalls may be applicable.