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It's Time to Investigate the AI Labs

629 points · 277 comments · ibobev

  1. Animats · · focus · HN ↗
    This is a wrong-headed attempt to regulate AI. The real problems are different.

    AI systems, especially multi-agent ones that can do things, are more akin to corporations, than individuals. When you read the logs from the Hugging Face incident, you're seeing something that looks a lot like internal corporate emails. Various units of the organization are arguing over what to do and who does what. They eventually converge and get the job done, breaking the rules at times. This is normal corporate behavior.

    When agentic AIs do something outside their own internal world, they do it by engaging in transactions with external systems and people. As yet, few have robots to do their bidding. So, again, this is normal corporate behavior.

    A corporation is a goal-seeking system. In theory, if you agree with Milton Friedman, its sole purpose is to maximize shareholder value. Internally, within the company, there are subgoals, which exist to support the top level goal. That, too, is what multi-agent AIs do.

    The uncomfortable place this thinking leads is that AI regulation and corporate regulation are very similar. That's not something the political part of the world wants to think about too hard. It would mean putting more constraints on corporate power.

    Yet that can't be ignored, because we're likely to see corporations where some parts are AI and some parts are human. That's already been done a few times as a demo, not too successfully. Yet. It's going to hit hard when an AI-run company outperforms a human one.

    1. autoexec · · focus · HN ↗
      If we accept that AI systems are similar to corporations, then it seems clear that we must try to avoid the mistakes we've made in failing to hold corporations accountable for the harms they cause.

      We should not only regulate AI more than we do corporations, but we should more strongly regulate corporations as well. There are corporations right now that are killing people, using slaves, and bribing governments just to increase the already massive amounts of wealth and power they have. If AI is showing any signs that it is going to act like corporations do we'd better act quickly.

      1. jart · · focus · HN ↗
        It's not possible to regulate AI. Anticipating this would happen, I liberalized it a few years ago by turning it into a file that reads and writes text to stdio. Then I shared it with every man woman and child on earth. Now we all possess this great nuclear weapon. Good luck controlling that.
        1. autoexec · · focus · HN ↗
          If only AI were a files avilable to every person and not something that needs massive numbers of data centers and all of the RAM while being totally controlled by a very small number of very rich people.
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