Afaik anyone can buy a bulldozer. Whether or not you are licensed to operate it is a different story, but there's nothing stopping you short of your conscience.
Licensed or not, you're fully liable for any damage you do with it. And possibly go to prison. I'd like to see crime committed by AI held to the same standards as crimes committed with any other tool.
I don't think the law makes a distinction over what tool you use to commit a crime.
The problem with AI is that the AI might do something that would constitute a crime (eg. attempting to land malicious code via a PR), but the general legal standard to convict a person of a crime is malicious intent (or sometimes negligence).
If the human user instructs the AI to do X and the AI does X by committing crimes in the process, the prosecution usually has to prove the human intended this to happen (or is somehow criminally negligent). For traditional tools, the user has much greater control over the tool so the intention can be more easily deduced from the results. For AI, at least for now, results can be wild. I don't think the legal system is prepared to put people in prison because their AI randomly ran amok after being given an innocuous prompt. This is analogous to holding a driver criminally liable for harming people due to a serious malfunction of the vehicle.
If anything, I think more liability should be imposed on AI developers.
I'd assume that after some number of news stories about AI agents committing crimes, the threshold for criminal negligence should be easy to reach for anyone who doesn't take proper precautions
A lot of negligence is of the "the last 30 times nothing went wrong" type, and the dangers are increasingly well known
I generally agree. But the field is evolving too fast for the legal system.
I'd imagine regulation and enforcement will come when things are starting to settle down.
The analogies with vehicles being inherently dangerous and require extra regulation are apt, because safety measures (eg. speed limits, seat belts, comprehensive road safety rules etc.) were implemented bit by bit, but way after the cars had been invented...
It's not. Nor are tractors, excavators or a myriad of other heavy equipment.
I saw upthread someone saying that manufactures should be liable if someone uses their products to cause harm. While emotionally this might make us feel good w.r.t. Guns, think about that when carried over to other industries.
Someone got hit, sue Ford. They didn't put in enough sensors to detect pedestrians and auto brake.
Someone hacked, sue Microsoft. They didn't do enough to detect malice action.
Someone 3D printed a gun and used it? Sue Bamboo, they didn't stop someone from printing illegal guns... oh wait already reaching this step.
Some people like to talk about “some people” snidely, instead of just coming out and saying “GP is bloodthirsty and gets a little thrill [etc].” Because of course, that’s what they mean, but they can’t back it up.
Would you like me too? I thought it unnecessary and needlessly rude to single anyone out: There are many examples of HN regulars behaving this way, and in my impression it has considerably increased over the last six years. I'm sure I could find a post or two of my own that is guilty of it-- it's increasingly the culture here, as unfortunate as it is and it's something we should all watch out for to avoid it in ourselves and to discount it in others.
I think it’s possible to observe something and be sure that it’s true in aggregate without being able to accuse any one individual of it. I propose that in those cases, bringing it up in response to an individual is not a good move. It doesn’t sound any less accusatory for being ostensibly about the general public.
Yes, indeed: the rich and poor alike have freedom from being allowed to sleep under bridges.
Come on; there are such obvious imbalances of power here that "each side has incredible freedom" is blatantly misleading.
On the one hand, you have each individual software engineer (because heaven forbid we should ever join unions! Those are for people who aren't A+ 10x alpha coders and negotiators, amirite?), every one of whom needs a salary so they can afford food, clothing, shelter, etc.
On the other hand, you have a group of the most wealthy and powerful countries the world has ever seen, who openly work together, have the ear of the flagrantly-corrupt president, and could coast on their cash reserves for, in some cases, many years even if every single customer decided to boycott them all at once.
And you think that "each side has incredible freedom" is a meaningful statement here...?
I think this is a salient point people are missing. This incredible freedom is equal on both sides, just as how companies are able to spread that risk around with multiple employees, it is common these days to have multiple jobs just in case of a layoff or other notable event where your job is lost.
I am doing a double take reading your comment and the parent comment of yours. They’re just so wildly corporate-biased.
I’m really not sure how we can conclude that the freedom is symmetrical.
The fact that this story made national news says everything about how rare it is for an employer to win a case like this. In most cases you just get fired for any reason with no notice or off-ramp. The employer is just always correct by default and you can easily be denied unemployment insurance because the company cooked up some official looking documents showing that you were fired with cause.
A corporation can spread risk by having 1,000 employees. I can’t have 1,000 jobs. It’s just not equal on both sides.
I mean, “incredible freedom is equal on both sides,” in the only developed country where there’s no mandatory paid parental leave and basic healthcare access depends on employment? Spare me.
My comments are not "corporate-biased", they are business owner biased, which includes small businesses.
Employment is an free arrangement between two entities, not a modern day serfdom where the employers are now responsible for their serfs housing, food, etc.
The power balance is tilted heavily towards employers though, no? If I quit you still have things like income and health care. If you fire me, not so much.
We can’t exactly say this isn’t a serfdom in a country where the majority of people depend on employer benefits to get access to affordable healthcare.
Small businesses definitely feel a squeeze that bigger companies don’t, but they’re not saints to be put on a pedestal, either.
In that regard, small businesses get a ton of carve-outs. For example, they don’t have to pay healthcare benefits to full time employees. They are exempt from a slew of regulations targeted at larger businesses.
I don’t really have the same reverence for small businesses that a lot of people do. They’re just companies. Some are good, some are bad. When you work for one, there’s still a power distance between you and the owner.
I find that many small business owners are taking things way too personally. Their business is their baby and therefore any employee that doesn’t have a grindset like them is taking advantage of them.
The small businesses I respect are the ones that move toward employee ownership. Employees who own the company care about the company and don’t try to screw it over. Problem solved.
What I got from this is if we mandate the hospitals open their rooms to the sun, the new correlation will cause people to avoid the sunlight because "it leads to more deaths"
I see his reply as "people say Rust is safe, but Rust just pushes it under a rug and pretends it's safe when it's still all there - just in a dependency"
So "enough of us" can take anything by forcing the asset to be valued at an artificially high value, force them to sell it for taxes, and then reduce the price down again to keep it ourselves?
No, it's called rule OF law. Not rule BY law. We create a law, like property rights, and we work within that framework. We don't suddenly decide that property rights don't matter any more because someone happens to have stuff we particularly want to take. That's how dictatorships work.
It would seem quite an essential liberty for a democratic polity to be able to impose this thing called "taxes". I suppose it's up to you to decide whether that is compatible with the rule of law and property rights.
We already have taxes, the vast majority of which are paid by the wealthy. Taxes are not a cap on allowable net worth. That is a different thing altogether. That is economic suicide.
Most of the rah rah billionaires shouldn't be allowed people are just proposing a wealth tax from what I've been told. If I'm wrong I'm open to hearing about it.
Wealth taxes are also economic suicide but most of the "rah rah billionaires shouldn't be allowed" people seem to have absolutely no idea how anything works and think billionaires have billions of dollars sitting in their checking accounts and they could easily write an "end homelessness" check but just don't because they're mean.
I don't really care to advocate much for wealth taxes since I don't particularly like them over other options. I just don't think imposing wealth taxes (even if they're progressive to the point that it's higher than the average growth rate of, e.g., equities, or maybe even just the risk-free rate when wealth is in the billions) is something that ought to be considered "how dictatorships work".
So you know, agree to disagree, I'm not going to argue anything other than that I don't particularly care for the framing of it as dictatorial or mob rule because the same can be done for other taxes. Which I have done and it doesn't appear you wish to dispute anyway.
Once again, OP is proposing not a tax but a wealth cap. A tax takes a percentage of whatever - income, wealth, transaction. It does not impose a limit on how much you are allowed to have. That is an entirely different phenomenon. We do have a whole constitutional amendment about the government unreasonably seizing your property and saying "well if it's more than this amount the government gets to take it all" is an unreasonable seizure of property.
I assume by OP you mean chipotle_coyote, which, reading their comment again, does not propose any specific policies and in fact explicitly disclaims knowing the specific best policy for the policy outcomes that they desire, which is anything that adresses the level of wealth inequality we currently have.
It literally says “what if people could only make a hundred million dollars?” I agree they do not provide any specific details about how to implement that, because it is an incredibly stupid idea that would be impossible to implement. He does say he doesn’t know what the best policy is. Well, I am here to give a hint: not that.
