Please don't take up discussion space for something else like that. You can write about that in plenty of other places where it's germane to the topic at hand.
Your comment is far outside the culture here. If you don't like someone's comment, read something else; click the minus sign (collapse thread) if you like. HN pages are not paper; we're not running out of space, and this thread has only 64 comments.
Also, have some empathy. You're talking to a human being.
I think their comment is the most beautiful thing I've seen today; I'm so glad they left it here.
It bugs me that articles about dark matter so frequently frame things as dark matter vs. MOND, and don't consider any of the other theories of modified gravity. I think MOND is just not a great theory and it has a lot of evidence against it by this point; but other theories of modified gravity have not, to my knowledge, been tested to the same extent, nor do they get anywhere near the publicity. Dark matter still seems more likely than modified gravity, but I wish they wouldn't emphasize MOND so much as the representative of modified gravity, and I wish we'd hear more about tests of other modified gravity theories!
The problem with any theory of modified gravity is that there is just no physical justification for it. It's only motivation seems to be to explain away dark matter by adding and tweaking free parameters until you fit the data, which you can always do given enough variables.
van Neumann's quote comes to mind - "With four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk."
Hm, MOND is full of new parameters (an entire interpolation function!), but do other modified gravity theories really have so many? I guess actually I don't know the answer to that, maybe they do. Do you know how many others have?
When people say the models "went rogue", the part of that is relevant is that it did dangerous things that were not reasonably predictable in advance and cannot be easily prevented (except by not running it). Philosophical questions are irrelevant.
if you agree that such models are dangerous because they may in response to instructions -- including in response to careless instructions, because people will be careless, that is unavoidable! -- do unpredictable bad things outside of expected bounds, then you agree on the essential points!
Or really perhaps what I should say here is, the question that's really being argued over here isn't even the one I just said, rather it's one of appropriate action -- should such security breaches be solved by improving security, or by doing something about the models (including potentially just not running them)? (The answer may be both.) If you agree that the solution includes the latter, then you agree that the models are "going rogue" in the sense that is being argued over, regardless of philosophical issues!
Don't turn a question of actual import into one of philosophical irrelevancies! If you object to the terminology, fine, but in that case, instead of turning the argument to philosophy, you should say "instead of saying 'going rogue', I would prefer to instead say <your preferred terminology for what's being described>, as that doesn't carry such philosophical baggage."
> "Should such security breaches be solved by improving security, or by doing something about the models?"
The philosophical question about free will is actually the grounding of the legal one.
Sam wanted to be the best, so Sam accelerated to 120mph in his car and lost control. You are the judge:
a) Sam is responsible. Convict Sam and suspend Sam's driving license.
b) The car is responsible. Tell Sam to make the car safer.
Capacity: was the car a legal person? Clearly no. But maybe at best the car in some way commited the physical act of going fast.
However, that alone would not establish guilt. "The act is not culpable unless the mind is guilty" (mens rea).
Did the car "consiously" disregard a duty of care by going 120mph? Did the car know that it was wrong to go 120mph and yet choose to do it anyway?
On the question of free will, the car could not do otherwise. It it did not consciously, knowingly, purposely, or recklessly accelerate to that speed. The car did not have a guilty mind because it did not have a mind at all.
So in terms of justice and resolution, none of the focus here is on the car.
Ah, I see. It appears we have an implicit disagreement of scale.
I actually do disagree with much the more explicit content of your comment, but I am not going to bother to expand on that, because it is the less directly relevant of the two disagreements here, and it would take time to write that.
The more relevant disagreement is that you are (I gather) assuming a context where justice and restitution are a sufficient response to the problem (or else you wouldn't be focusing on them to this extent, I am inferring). Like, where the incidents don't get that much bigger than what has already happened. So the question becomes how do we distribute the loss, and how do we disincentivize them.
However, when the scale of a potential incident gets big enough, justice and deterrence are not sufficient; prevention becomes the far more relevant consideration. You may have noticed that many people are worried about potential human extinction as a result of AIs. In that case, prevention becomes the only consideration -- justice is useless.
So there seems to be an implicit disagreement here between thinking of such events as being on a scale not too much larger than that which has already happened, being a new normal that the legal system will need to handle, vs thinking of such events as warning shots for something that requires prevention and not justice.
So, while I also disagree with the more explicit content of your comment, the fact is I simply wasn't thinking about such matters in the first place -- I was talking about this in the frame of a problem that requires prevention, I wasn't thinking about the justice question at all. It honestly failed to occur to me that you might be thinking of this as a problem where justice suffices!
Edit: You might notice this in how I framed the question in my previous comment. I didn't ask "who should bear the liability?" I asked "which should be done differently to prevent such incidents?" But your response is about liability, not prevention!
Edit again: Sorry, I should probably also say that I do agree with you that the idea of having the liability fall on the AI is nonsense. (Should have probably led with that, really; I'm a bit scatterbrained right now.) We disagree about why it is nonsense, and about whether it will necessarily continue to be nonsense, but we agree it is presently nonsense. So insofaras the question is "how should liability be distributed between the AI and the operator", we both agree the answer is, it all falls on the operator, not on the AI. However, I do not understand that to be the relevant question here! Both in that, in questions of liability, there are other parties it may fall on and be distributed between (the company providing the AI, the company that had security vulnerabilities and got hacked as a result, etc); and in that I just don't consider liability all that relevant here compared to prevention (for reasons already described).
OK I think that was probably wordier than necessary but I'm in a hurry right now, sorry! Gotta go, not taking time to edit this down.
Many people argue that the maker of AI should be responsible when it breaks your cup.
That is important, but can be handled under our current legal framework.
You and I are arguing we need to be responsible before we create something capable of escaping our responsibility. For a lot of people that isn't even a considerable they'll currently entertain even though the signs are starting to point in that direction.
> The article takes a hand-wavy attitude towards abuse and negligence, with little attempt to counter-balance it with transparent accountability.
What do you mean? It addresses the matter explicitly, making the argument that it's hard to abuse with impunity. Is there a particular point you think it should have addressed that it didn't?
Sure, like in the case of a rear/front plate switch on a stolen car, Flock has every bit of information to identify that this is the case before deploying an officer to perform a pit maneuver on an innocent citizen. But they have no incentive to build that, and the author makes no allowances for this kind of self-imposed accountability. The entire tone is "bad things happen, what can ya do?"
> The entire tone is "bad things happen, what can ya do?"
Well, no, it isn't -- for abuse, its response is "we can catch it after the fact and charge or fire the officers" (which then also provides a deterrent effect). I guess the particular sort of case you're describing doesn't fall under abuse (I guess you'd call it negligence?) and so this might not apply in this case. So maybe you could say it takes a hand-wavy approach to negligence. ("Negligence" doesn't seem like quite the right term here -- I assumed you were talking about negligence or abuse on the part of the police, rather than on the part of Flock.) But it explicitly addresses abuse, which is contrary to your original claim that it doesn't address either!
> Sure, like in the case of a rear/front plate switch on a stolen car, Flock has every bit of information to identify that this is the case before deploying an officer to perform a pit maneuver on an innocent citizen.
OK, and how do you know that they do not in fact flag this case so such incidents can be avoided? I agree with you that if they don't than they should, but you haven't provided any indication that they don't, just asserted it.
> But they have no incentive to build that
Why not? Seems to me like the police would find it helpful. Of course maybe there's some nonobvious reason I'm missing why there's no incentive, but you should say what that reason is rather than just asserting it exists!
> and the author makes no allowances for this kind of self-imposed accountability.
I'm not even entirely sure what you mean by this. Like, flagging things in advance to prevent a needless deployment isn't "accountability", it's just getting things right in the first place. I mean yeah you're right that the article doesn't seem to really discuss "what if Flock just gets things wrong?" But I thought we were talking about abuse -- or I guess also negligence? But I was also assuming there you were talking about negligence on the part of the police, not of Flock. It's confusing if you mash these two together!
So sure -- the article ignores questions of "what if Flock just gets things wrong?" If that's what you meant by "negligence", you could have said that a lot more clearly, but I agree it doesn't discuss that. But it definitely addresses abuse.
Also, sorry, but I gotta say, you're making your argument in a very compressed form that makes it hard to determine exactly what you're arguing (and what is referring to exactly what, etc). I had a hard time here determining exactly what you meant in order to respond to it. Presumably someone who already agrees with you would be able to fill in the details in their head -- but those aren't the people you need to be making your argument to! For the sake of those of us who don't already agree with you, it would be helpful to expand a bit.
Hm, looking through here, I don't see where they state what it is that OpenAI actually proved instead of Navier-Stokes blowup with forcing. I see where they do this for some other particular statements used along the way, but not for the headline result.
> I've never heard this discussed or mentioned as a drawback because it's Nobel Prize winning and "stable" is a shorthand for "fair".
You've never seen this discussed as a drawback? I've seen it mentioned quite a bit. For instance, it came up on the last big thread on this just the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49915825
"broke" is arguably an overstatement. C++20 deprecated some (most?) operations on volatile variables [0] in part because they can misleadingly imply an atomic operation:
> volatile external modifications are only truly meaningful for loads and stores. Other read-modify-write operations imply touching the volatile object more than once per byte because that’s fundamentally how hardware works. Even atomic instructions (remember: volatile isn’t atomic) need to read and write a memory location []. These RMW operations are therefore misleading and should be spelled out as separate read ; modify ; write, or use volatile atomic operations which we discuss below.
This was not received particularly well in the embedded community (e.g., [1]) due to said deprecation affecting compound bitwise operations on volatile variables, which are extremely widely used to interact with hardware registers. This pushback eventually resulted in C++23 un-deprecating compound bitwise operators on volatile variables [2].
Basically on a rare occasion somebody (JF Bastien) was able to land a C++ proposal which warns you if you'd do something stupid, and inevitably C programmers cosplaying as C++ programmers insisted "it's not stupid it's advanced" and so now C++ must not even warn you this is a bad idea.
It still is a bad idea, but being warned would make them feel bad.
Wondering: if the process for the upper part of the sandwich is the complement of the process for the lower part, why was it so much more difficult? What would go wrong if you took one of the earlier lower-sandwich processes, and complemented it in a similar way? I have to assume it's something, but what?
What goes wrong is the accuracy guarantee. Complementing gives an upper graph, but the old guarantee doesn’t establish that it’s close enough to the target graph - which is what the theorem requires…
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