Computers Cannot Make Decisions

(wiki.cateat.fish)

27 points | by heavensteeth 2 hours ago

13 comments

  • createful 0 minutes ago
    I fully agree that companies are doing this, not their "agents", and that companies are responsible for the damages they do.

    But I don't think the average person with their $20 subscription to whoever is the primary source of revenue. Enterprises fund most of it by buying API keys and making those fancy chatbot buttons on their sites that nobody clicks, as well as some internal business automations if I had to guess.

    If it was just average people with $20 subscriptions funding all this (keep in mind, most people using AI services do not pay for it), by now, all these AI companies would have gone bankrupt.

  • foreigner 17 minutes ago
    I would go farther and argue that companies don't make decisions either. They are also not people (legal nonsense notwithstanding). Individual actual humans make decisions and they're the ones who should be held accountable.
    • laserbeam 9 minutes ago
      Isn’t that half the point of companies? To be accountability sinks? To vanish accountability like a magic trick?
  • fwlr 1 hour ago
    If you brought down prod and deleted customer data and told them Claude did it, you’d still be the one in trouble. So they do know how to hold people accountable for actions taken by AI.
  • mugul 41 minutes ago
    Has any of the targetted organizations (e.g the Australian government) engaged in legal actions against Anthropic/OpenAI? If not then I'm afraid the situation won't change. Even worse it could send the wrong signal that there is a "legal blur" around this topic.
  • hdgvhicv 37 minutes ago
    Management aren’t held accountable either. They have prepared three envelopes long before the impact of their decisions is felt.
  • vladsh 25 minutes ago
    let's make up imaginary scenarios and get offended by them

    mistakes happen. sometimes catastrophic decisions (or indecision) are made, and people and companies are held accountable for them, or not

    some companies are too big or too important to fall. we can all agree or disagree on things, but what AI specific behavior are we actually talking about?

    • hypfer 23 minutes ago
      Spoken like a true middle manager doing damage control against ethics complaints.
  • jasongi 27 minutes ago
    Someone out there is reading this and thinking... ok we just need to it a body and free will so it can be held accountable.
  • louwrentius 8 minutes ago
    This is a multi-trillion dollar industry, too much money is at stake to be all ethical, moral and principled about things!
  • visarga 43 minutes ago
    [dead]
  • pnut 1 hour ago
    Pretty sure the author means "must not" or "should not", because they absolutely can.
    • shric 20 minutes ago
      No they can’t. The author’s point is these are computer programs written by humans. It doesn’t matter if they’re LLM backed or not.

      If I write a program:

      if (rand() % 2) launch_missles();

      And wire that function to actually launch a missile, the computer didn’t make a decision. And so it is with people prompting agents.

    • thefz 45 minutes ago
      Well, if I ask "option A or B?" and the computer rolls a boolean, it can still count as a decision but no context was taken in.
  • jdw64 55 minutes ago
    [dead]
  • simonh 1 hour ago
    > OAI/Anthropic COULD stop their models from doing what they are doing…

    Has the alignment problem been solved, then?

    • moi2388 1 hour ago
      No, but removing the internet cable really isn’t that difficult
      • ares623 56 minutes ago
        They're a small scrappy bootstrapped startup, cut them some slack.
  • tosti 30 minutes ago

       > Your Claude subscriptions are funding this. You are funding this.
    
    Author makes it all personal and accuses the reader with bold and unsubstabtiated claims. At this point I have to question the validity of the article. If author has a beef with "AI" companies, I sympathize. IMHO, not keeping to oneself doesn't help to make the case.