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by chgs 500 days ago
What is the purpose of putting a person in jail or fining them?

Retribution? Reformation? Prevention?

4 comments

Consider the Volkswagen scandal where code was written that fudged the results when in an emissions testing environment.

The only person to see major punishment for that was the software dev that wrote the code, but that decision to write that code involved far more people up the chain. THEY should be held accountable in some way or else nothing prevents them from using some other poor dev as a scapegoat.

So far. The trials are ongoing but it has cost a few CEOs their jobs which while not all that consequential isn’t nothing.
Oh interesting. I hadn't heard much about it recently. Thanks.
In this context, prevention. So people see what happens if they screw up in a negligent way and make sure to not do it themselves.
Wouldn’t an AI be able to be fixed to not break in the same way though, thus meeting the requirement?
No, you don’t just want to fix the problem every time until no problems are left. You want to force people to think about what they’re going to do so that problems that can be anticipated aren’t made in the first place.
All of the above. Whether or not one agrees with it, humans have a need for retribution, or as we prefer to call it to feel better about it, justice. And you cannot get retribution on LLMs.
Mixture of all three, but for the purposes of “accountability”, prevention of the behavior in the first place. But I don’t want to debate prisons when that’s derailing the larger point of “accountability in AI/computers”.