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by logifail 1116 days ago
> Surely the equivalent is the reward during training?

Surely the counter-example to when a self-driving vehicle drives straight into a stationary fire truck?[0]

If a human driver did this more than once (and lived to tell the tale!) - yet had no explanation other than "Of course I saw it, but I wasn't sure what it was and didn't realise I needed to avoid hitting it it <shrug>" - wouldn't they lose their driving licence fairly quickly?

[0] https://www.google.com/search?q=tesla+stationary+fire+truck
1 comments
ben_w 1116 days ago
That's not a useful counter example.

You asked for the incentives for AI; the equivalent isn't the same as for humans.

The nature of the AI doesn't include a concept of prison or licensing, so it can't be threatened with it, for the same reason I can't threaten a human driver with Af'nek-leigh D'Och entRah'negh.

I can however 'punish' (air-quotes necessary because it might not feel like anything) an AI by altering the weights and biases of its network — once done, it then thinks differently.

Don't anthropomorphise it, that's a category error.

Also, the field of "how does it even?" is tiny, which is itself a reason to not grant them control of vehicles, but that's a separate issue.

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logifail 1116 days ago
> You asked for the incentives for AI; the equivalent isn't the same as for humans. The nature of the AI doesn't include a concept of prison or licensing, so it can't be threatened with it [..]

There certainly should be incentives for the humans creating an AI, though.

> Don't anthropomorphise it, that's a category error.

Volkswagen [human!] engineers created the illegal defeat devices in Dieselgate, under the supervision of their [human!] managers. The device is illegal, we punish the humans in charge when laws are broken, not the devices themselves. It should be the same with AI.

If this means software engineering becomes a field where you need mandatory liability insurance to work on AI, is that a bad thing?

In the glorious words of Stelios Haji-Ioannou, "If you think safety is expensive, try [having] an accident"

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