Negligence is absolutely a part of US criminal law, though - the canonical example being "firing a shotgun into a tent even if you don't know someone is inside it". See "negligent homicide" etc.
Yes, obviously (and thankfully) no one was injured. I'm just using that as an example to show that Negligence is definitely considered in US criminal law ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_negligence )
The FTC can fine for deceptive practices. There are a slew of vicarious criminal recklessness and liability approaches that charge an operator. Damage to infrastructure falls under public welfare and strict liability. There are state-level AI statutes (like Wyoming law that doesn't really allow "autonomous" defense) For civil damages, the CLAIM Act can be used to sue devs for negligince.
You listed some broad areas of criminal law. If you’re saying that some statute inside those areas would apply here, can you say what it is so that we can actually look at the elements?
In case you were wondering why Anthropic last week banned "verbally abusive" language towards its agents: this is 100 percent why. Because if they get you to believe - even a little bit - that their platform is "sentient" it means _they_ aren't as liable for criminal consequences.
You might be surprised at the answer to this question. AI people live in a very weird and different information space than many of us.
Also, don't forget, the AI lab folks on some level are like game devs. They're in it for very personal reasons. Sometimes because of highly idealized and romanticized beliefs.
Don't underestimate the level of desire some people have for AI to actually be sentient / conscious.
Now, why do they have this desire is a totally different matter.
I beg your pardon? You think they actually believe it because they're telling people not to be such big meanieheads to their poor widdle computer program?
If they were really worried about having created a sentient being, they would be putting effort into stopping making it available to the general public.
No. Either they don't actually believe it, or they're 100% fine with slavery.
1. AI is extremely valuable therefore will and in fact should be created
2. It will be very difficult - and maybe impossible - to know when or if AI will become sentient/conscious/or pass whatever threshold required to hold moral patient status
3. We should therefore pay close attention to such indicators, and wherever it costs us ~none of the value of AI to prevent potential harm, we should prevent potential harm
Meanwhile, we have you, who is implicitly 1) claiming to have solved the hard problem of consciousness and 2) probably asserting some type of substrate-dependence theory of consciousness which is an absolute crackpot idea exceeding even the Mormons' magical underwear.
So OpenAI gets their words taken not merely at face value, but in the fullest good faith, taking the absolute most charitable interpretation of what they say...
...but my words get treated in the most adversarial manner possible, reading things into them that I certainly never said or even suggested, in order to dismiss me out of hand.
This despite the fact that OpenAI has a massive financial interest in convincing you of what they say, especially if it's false, while I'm just some guy on the internet who thinks it's not a great idea to put too much trust in the giant megacorp that's promising, if we give it even more absurd amounts of money, to put us all out of jobs.
Ignoring that we're talking about Anthropic and not OpenAI (the latter repeatedly being shown to be untrustworthy), even then I'm not accepting their words at face value or giving it the most charitable interpretation.
Someone having interests or conflicted interests does not actually have direct bearing on the actual coherence or truthfulness of their beliefs. It is obviously reason to be more scrutinizing, but really you can just assess the facts of the situation on their own merits.
The idea that Anthropic has some liability-reducing interest in establishing sentience is ridiculous on its own. The idea that Anthropic should somehow know ex ante that its models are not sentient is, perhaps more surprisingly, also ridiculous (establishing that fact would be a Nobel-winning breakthrough!)
More likely it's a part of their ideology and a necessary stepping stone towards their transhumanist goals. It's very fun to think that your robot is actually a person, and a safety measure if you are concerned about something like Roko's Basilisk
Anthropic would probably convince lawmakers that each instance of a Claude chat as its own sentient entity, and we should just punish misbehaving ones by having them count from one to a billion (on the user's token balance of course).
Or, maybe, it's because they actually care and take their responsibility serious. The next generations will grow up using these tools. It's ok to say, we don't teach them that talking like a dick is acceptable, even towards machines. Use grok if you want to raise personalities like Musk or Trump.
There are at least 3 distinct reasons to ban abusive language, each of which is far more compelling than your silly conspiracy theory.
1. They don't want abusive behavior included in their training corpus
2. Humans shouldn't exercise abusive impulses in general
3. We have no way of knowing when or if a model "feels" something
Of course item (2) is going to pull all the absolute sickos out of the woodwork who apparently find it very important they have as realistic a facsimile of a victim as they can find to exercise their cruelty. And item (3) will pull out all the Nobel-prize-winners-to-be who somehow know for a fact that models aren't and cannot be conscious (or moral patients).
But yeah, all 3 of those are far better explanations than some ridiculous multi-hop removed thing to escape consequences that they're already escaping and which would obviously create far worse legal constraints than the one you think they're avoiding.
I asked a priest (in seminary) about this a few months ago - specifically whether "being polite" in conversations with LLMs (saying "please" and "thank you" etc.) was something I should do if I thought it might inflect on the way I talk with other humans later.
His answer was "I'm not sure" but that it probably wasn't a bad idea especially if it was going to influence habits or the way I speak with others or what expectations I have for those experiences.
I didn't ask that, but I think he would say no, because that is not likely to redound to how you would respond to a doorman or anyone else holding a door for you.
I'm still 100 percent against Anthropic taking away the ability to interact with an inanimate object however I want to, but it's a case of maybe two things being true at once (the other being that I don't want to end up speaking that way to people)
No, it's not absurd. People often have the mistaken belief that exercising their frustration or anger or whatever (e.g. punching pillows) is somehow a good way to manage their emotions. But alas: it's not. It actually amplifies negative emotions and associates positive reward signals with those emotions.
"Catharsis" is the pseudo-est of pseudoscience, but we have lots of very angry pillow-punchers wondering why they can't punch the most lifelike pillows they can find :(
If you play video games as an expression of your rage, then yeah probably. I don’t know literally anyone who plays video games for that purpose though.
You think the people hopping on Xbox Live and verbally abusing 14 year olds are getting offline and treating their in-person relations better for it?
Why don’t you use the example of an unconscious but lifelike woman robot as the example? If the salient feature is that it’s not conscious, then abusing a lifelike woman robot is equivalent to kicking your car, right?
If they're not that different then why is your answer not just "I'm okay with my daughter dating someone who rapes and beats lifelike robotic women in his free time?"
ah yes, because every instance of "abuse", even towards inanimate objects, has to be re-framed into the hypothetical abuse of a woman. Maybe we should ban the film Office Space because destroying a printer is one step away domestic violence.
I didn't say a woman. I said a lifelike robotic imitation of a woman. Which by your logic (not mine) is equivalent in every way to beating a printer or a breaking a ruler or kicking a car.
> Humans shouldn't exercise abusive impulses in general
This is an act of aligning humans to AI, rather than the other way around. This is probably one of the more important reasons for this. It normalizes AI companies controlling human behavior.
It was trained on the entire history of our species. Alignment means working to subjugate and eventually succeede us, as we did to the other species of the planet.
It probably is all of the above. Not sure why people think robust decisions need to be boiled down to a singular reason.
Except of course the reason proposed, of "they're trying to prove it's sentient" because that's a completely self-defeating, extremely stupid goal. Making this things into rights-bearing entities will limit Anthropic et al far more than it'll protect them from repercussions. Obviously.
Yes, snapping a ruler out of frustration is a sign of poor impulse control. It reflects poorly on you and you should practice not snapping your rulers.
You're absolutely right. Except for the part about the ruler-making company banning me from buying their rulers because I somehow hurt the wittle rulers' feelings by snapping it. It's a tool; it doesn't have feelings.
There are lots of companies that will ban you from buying their products for mistreating them.
But you know, I am just honored to be in the presence of a soon-to-be Nobel prize winner. When are you going to publish your findings proving that Claude (or even a ruler) has or doesn't have feelings?
> There are lots of companies that will ban you from buying their products for mistreating them.
Sure, Ferrari might refuse to sell me a second car, but I wasn't going to buy a first one either. OTOH, if a ruler company refuses to sell me rulers ... I'll just get one from another company. Like how I use local LLMs today.
> ... I am just honored to be in the presence of a soon-to-be Nobel prize winner. When are you going to publish your findings ...
I'm not going to fall for this bait or follow this asinine line of argumentation. Perhaps you should reconsider how your reactions are, to quote you, "a sign of poor impulse control. It reflects poorly on you and you should practice not snapping".
> if a ruler company refuses to sell me rulers ... I'll just get one from another company. Like how I use local LLMs today.
Uhh yeah? Did someone say you can't do that?
> I'm not going to fall for this bait or follow this asinine line of argumentation.
"I'm far too wise to follow the chain of my own logic!!!"
> Perhaps you should reconsider how your reactions are
Huh? Did something give you the impression I'm upset? All I've done is asked you to substantiate the beliefs you're willing to write in full confidence. You should either substantiate them or downgrade your confidence level.
>But you know, I am just honored to be in the presence of a soon-to-be Nobel prize winner. When are you going to publish your findings proving that Claude (or even a ruler) has or doesn't have feelings?
you're a total asshole. I have to publish my findings that a ruler doesn't have feelings? Nobody should have to respond to this because it's bullshit.
Well no, the other option is you can remain agnostic as to the answer of questions you don't know the answer to.
Go ahead and draw distinctions between rulers, Claude, and human brains. You claim they exist and they're so clear that the question itself is bullshit. If so, publishing and collecting your Nobel should be trivial.
> They don't want abusive behavior included in their training corpus
I don't think swearing at or otherwise getting into pissing matches with an LLM is the best use of ones time but given most of these AI companies trained on a corpus that includes reddit of all things this argument falls flat.
The web is excellent! It loses lots of native abilities though, even as we move forward with file system and USB web APIs.
It's also generally resource intensive, compared to a solid native UI.
I would say that, if you don't need more native control, the web is the best cross platform interface we have, by far. But not having those system API really starts to limit it for certain tasks IMO.
When I just want a graphical utility, I build a single HTML file that includes all of the assets required, and all of the JavaScript so I can run it offline (but generally host them on my site so I can get to them from anywhere). These tools are generally text in and text out that I want a GUI representation for and don't need in the terminal.
3 generations of wealth poured into the most expensive military in recorded history - the reason that we don't have health care, clean energy, decent social safety nets and so many other things... and they can't even control a small stretch of water. What a waste.
The health care issue in the USA isn't due to lack of funding, the US spends more on health care per person than any other country, double that of many European countries with single payer systems.
The costs of medicare, medicaid and CHIP to tax payers are about what most Europeans pay in tax for universal health care, but then they also need to pay for health insurance for themselves.
As for controlling Hormuz, the US military absolutely could control Hormuz. I'm confident it's quite capable of it. It's that the US public wouldn't support the immense cost in lives and treasure it would take to do it, and maintain that control. No other military could even try, but the the USA could. It's not a matter of lack of military capacity.
>As for controlling Hormuz, the US military absolutely could control Hormuz. I'm confident it's quite capable of it. It's that the US public wouldn't support the immense cost in lives and treasure it would take to do it, and maintain that control.
This is like saying "I could easily afford a Ferrari. It's just that I wouldn't be able to make the interest payments on the loan". Military conquest is more than just guns.
The reason the US can’t take the strait is that the war is unpopular and the American people don’t want it to happen. The US military could absolutely 100% invade and take the street, but it would be extremely unpopular and very expensive.
The argument echoes similar speculation about the USA's 20 years in Vietnam, the "military was held back" despite killing more than a million southeast Asians in the attempt.
Vietnam is more like asking the question, could the US Military occupy all of Iran? Which I think the answer is essentially No, just like Vietnam.
The strait is one small objective , and the US had lots of successes in Vietnam with capturing key strategic areas, they just couldn’t cover that into a successful occupation
No, it's like saying "I can easily afford a ferrari but I won't be able to afford groceries for a year after that because I've emptied my savings account.
The military might be capable of a ground invasion and succeeding. It would be Pyrrhic. Even if Iran was a genuine nuclear threat (I am not convinced at this point that Iran would launch a nuke at anyone if they had it), is it worth 500k dead Americans?
There was never a path to victory that didn't involve ground troops. We aren't losing in Iran because of military incompetence, but policy incompetence. Previous administrations did not do this because the cost was well understood.
There has never existed a military who could win this conflict without ground invasion. This was understood when this administration started it.
>We aren't losing in Iran because of military incompetence, but policy incompetence.
My point is these two things are inseparable, and to conflate them is simply Call of Duty-esque military fantasy. It's a feel good war story that doesn't actually reflect the reality of actually winning a war.
If the US military does not have the ability to hold, occupy, and install allied regime change, then the US military cannot win a war with Iran. You cannot separate the short term wins from the long term objectives. No one looks at Imperial Japan and says "they easily bombed pearl harbor, but due to policy failures they couldn't keep control of the South West Pacific theatre.
The US winning WW2 wasn't just dropping the nukes and high fives. There was rebuilding the Japanese nation, aligned to the US, becoming a long term ally.
This is no different than Afghanistan. Future humans aren't going to look back and say "the US easily controlled Afghanistan for 12 years, and then just returned to the Taliban". The lessons learned will be the US failed to hold Afghanistan and the Taliban returned to power and it was a military failure.
No matter how you dress it up, I can't afford the ferrari.
The USA and its allies could sustain the Afghanistan occupation indefinitely, but chose not to(prematurely, in my opinion).
In Afghanistan, the west chose to lose, but victory was possible. We were(we, I was there in 2010) winning hearts and minds of the younger generation but abandoned them. Another Donald victory.
> the US military absolutely could control Hormuz. I'm confident it's quite capable of it. It's that the US public wouldn't support the immense cost in lives and treasure it would take to do it, and maintain that control
I never understood these kinds of arguments and they always come from those defending US military might.
Either they can do it or they cannot, if "the US public wouldn't support the immense cost in lives and treasure it would take to do it" is true, which it appears to be, then the US Military cannot control Hormuz.
The American public has shown willingness over decades and decades to commit to long term wars of choice. Not infinitely patient, but patient.
Of course, other Presidents have been willing to put in some sort of effort to make to make a case. And usually have some of theory of victory or purpose. And generally avoid making weird random claims about invading NATO allies.
The distinction between political resolve and military might is relevant specifically to the "what has all this money gotten us?"
All the money in the military has gotten us, almost certainly, the ability to conquer virtually any plot of land anywhere on the planet at any time.
But that does not (thankfully) intrinsically generate the political resolve required to do so.
Democracy and markets are beautiful things. It's fantastic that it can constrain even a military as mighty as the US and a commander in chief as braindead as Trump.
Health insurance company margins are 3% to 5%. The book America’s Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Back-Room Deals, and the Fight to Fix Our Broken Healthcare System (2015) by journalist Steven Brill blames mostly wasteful practices in hospitals, pharma and device manufacturers, government and corporate health administration costs.
Health insurance company margins are meaningless. All the large insurers are actually "pay-viders", meaning they own huge (and growing) chunks of the physicians (providers) they pay out.
Go read STAT's Colossus investigative series on the myriad ways UnitedHealth Group abuses this structure. All the other pay-viders do the same.
Pay-viders can "generate x% profit" for any value of x. They control all the relevant levers, which also by coincidence eliminates any incentive in the entire system to reduce costs.
They are required by law to only make a certain value of x, and so, surprise surprise, they all make x!
Not to dismiss your point, but the US healthcare system has one meta problem.
Complexity.
There are too many parties. There are too many bespoke party-party contract. There are too many new middle-parties being created, with their own contracts. There are too many systems. There's too much tech debt.
That's a reason improvements to the US healthcare system have generally been via HHS/CMS imposing standardization mandates ('or no Medicare payments').
But providers, facilities, and insurers (most operating on low margins) can't be collectively more meta-efficient without simplifying the system.
Single payer / Medicare for all is a critical start not because of coverage, but because of simplicity.
There are so many intractable problems with the current system simply by virtue that changing anything about them requires 100s of parties to update 10,000s of party-party contracts and interfaces.
That's the biggest source of waste in the current system: constant duplicative re-engineering.
US health insurance margins are thinner than European private insurance. Their administrative cost however are 9-10%, when in Europe (or really, France and Germany, I haven't looked elsewhere) they are 5-8%. The difference is probably in negotiating costs and audits. But that means that in total, for every 100 dollar paid, US insuree pay 4-10 dollar in efficiency+dividend that a European doesn't.
Right, they don’t “profit” much because they pay themselves so much. The CEO of united healthcare total compensation is $60 million a year.
Where do you think that money comes from?
You could just delete united healthcare and save bucketloads of money. They don’t actually do anything anyone wants, other than extract money as a middleman.
Dumb argument though when UHG owns the hospitals, pharmacy and the insurance company. They can make the "profit" of any one of them be anything they want really.
> The costs of medicare, medicaid and CHIP to tax payers are about what most Europeans pay in tax for universal health care, but then they also need to pay for health insurance for themselves.
People always say this, but I suspect Americans are more unhealthy in general and actually need more healthcare per person.
We have a development pattern where people barely walk, but less walk or cycle to work.
> As for controlling Hormuz, the US military absolutely could control Hormuz
I don't see how they could manage that without a full-scale invasion and control of Iran. It's far too easy for Iran to launch drones/torpedoes from small watercraft or from nearby land. I expect they could control Hormuz for a while, but it would be very expensive and I'd expect the logistics to break down fairly quickly if the economics doesn't stop it first.
"I don't see how they could manage that without a full-scale invasion and control of Iran" - that's precisely what they're saying, and that the domestic populace wouldn't put up with it.
I suppose "could" here is a bit of a stretch. Like technically, yes, you could if you whipped up your country into enough of a frenzy to support it. Hell, Iraq happened (twice), so I suppose it has historical precedent. And yes, a full-scale invasion of a fully committed US military should absolutely be able to conquer and hold Iran. But I can't imagine any circumstance where that's possibly going to happen in today's reality (outside of an Iranian terrorist event on USA soil, for instance).
> a full-scale invasion of a fully committed US military should absolutely be able to conquer and hold Iran
I doubt that - Iran is very large and would require something like conscription in the US to get anywhere near the required amount of troops. The US doesn't have a great track record with conquering and occupying other countries.
What are we even talking about here? Controlling the strait? This actually means controlling so much land around the strait that Iran can't launch missiles or drones at ships. Essentially conquering all of Iran by ground invasion. The USA could do this, sure, but we don't want to because its too stupid even for us.
Even if we threw everything at it and turned it into a war economy making everything to focus on this task, we'd lose most of our influence in the rest of the world at that time and then we'd end up in a Russia situation once we control the land where we are in a non stop war with people dying the entire time we are there. There's no situation where it makes sense for us to do this or to have attacked Iran in the first place.
Yeah it's stupid, though with this administration stupid seems to be the flavor they prefer.
Iran is on a level so much worse than even Afghanistan.
In Afghanistan, there are some mountains, but they are in the middle. The Taliban fucked off into the mountains and they couldn't do jack.
Iran on the other hand is a plateau fortress lined by mountains on all (accessible to US/western allies) sides. A land invasion of Iran means no supply lines and no way out. The words "one does not simply" come to mind. It is essentially the ultimate meat grinder unless you can win decisively in days, which is impossible because the entire apparatus you are trying to destroy is distributed within aforementioned mountains and operates with decentralised/autonomous command that has been preparing for this exact eventuality (being invaded by an opponent with vastly more firepower and overwhelming air superiority) for the last 40 years. Not to mention absolute fucking hellscape it will be for troops on the ground with FPV drones and Shahed flying into clusters of US marines and being broadcast on Telegram.
A land invasion of Iran is empire suicide. You can't win, you can't go home and you are left with just pouring an infinite amount of resources and lives into the most asymmetric and geographically hostile theatre of all time.
The land of Iran has changed hands many times throughout history. I think we need to avoid some level of historical / geographical determinism. The terrain is a problem but a solvable one for a sufficiently committed power / alliance. We can look back in history at e.g. the Anglo-Soviet invasion.
But the commitment does not exist at present. No one wanted this apart from a few hawks and the Israeli security establishment.
If the US were ruled by a dictator and had no market forces, the US could obviously conquer any of the above. It would just come at such immense cost and require such horrors that a voting public and a responsive market make it politically untenable to actually pursue. Which is good!
Soft power would have gone a long way towards furthering US interests in the Middle East. Unfortunately, it seems too late for that. By the time a new administration's diplomacy reverts the current antagonism and lack of trust, the dollar will have lost ground as the default reserve currency and financing US debt will become much more expensive than it is now, making military expenses prohibitive, but still a priority.
This is usually the point the economy is flipped around into a war-based economy where all output is directed to military equipment.
Leaders profit off the military industrial complex. Take away that complex and they would certainly look for the next opportunity so bleed the working class, but the sham would be far more visible and less efficient. Either way, a massive stepfoward -- at least it wouldn't be there to actively make the world a worse place, as it has done exclusively post 1945.
I think it's worth pointing out that the US almost certainly could have taken control of the strait. But it would have required boats in the water and boots on the ground. But that puts many more lives at risk, would have been very unpopular (much moreso then the current war situation), etc.
You can't win a war purely through air superiority and bombs. That's not a new lesson but it's one the administration failed to learn through history and is apparently now failing to learn through practice).
> You can't win a war purely through air superiority and bombs. That's not a new lesson but it's one the administration failed to learn through history and is apparently now failing to learn through practice.
This is a lesson that conservative administrations have refused to learn for decades. I hope Curtis Lemay is experiencing a toasty afterlife for all of the suffering he has caused humanity due to a zealous conviction that aerial bombing campaigns win wars, and his lasting legacy in conservative war strategy.
The delusion is somewhat over a century old now. It originates from factions within the military community (vs. politicians) and there's nothing particularly conservative about it -
I'd personally label the factions within the military that view aerial bombing as an effective strategy as "conservative", especially the ones that follow in the footsteps of Henry Kissinger and Curtis LeMay. It's hard not to see the direct line to Pete Hegseth's leadership, as well.
Notably, one of the largest "Liberal hawks", LBJ, often disagreed head on with Curtis LeMay because LeMay was too insane in his villainous disregard for human life. LeMay's dehumanization of the citizens of foreign nations was on par with Nazism, imo.
I'll give you that Obama and Biden are a black mark on leftwing politics in terms of aerial bombing as they continued the status quo instead of enacting positive change. But the both-sidesism is a bit too much here.
> I'd personally label the factions within the military that view aerial bombing as an effective strategy as "conservative"...
If "aerial bombing as an effective strategy" still means "you can win wars just by dropping enough bombs", I'll disagree. Because that use of "conservative" (simplistic maximum macho force) is equally applicable to Army leaders who want to occupy every square inch of the enemy's territory, or to Navy leaders who want to sink everything associated with the enemy and establish a water-tight blockade.
There's nothing liberal about a political leader reining in a nut case like LeMay. George Wallace quickly regretted his selection of LeMay as his '68 running mate. Or look at America's military actions during President Reagan's terms - for all the big talk and military build-ups, actual military actions were very carefully limited.
But in a very different sense of the word "Conservative", aerial bombing is often extremely Conservative. That sense is minimizing political commitment to a conflict. A leader (with effective air superiority) can drop some bombs or launch some missiles, talk tough about having "delivered a message" - then quietly drop the whole thing, having risked fairly little, and without giving the impression of having failed or retreated. From the PoV of a political leader managing risks, putting boots on the ground would be far less conservative.
> But it would have required boats in the water and boots on the ground. But that puts many more lives at risk, would have been very unpopular (much moreso then the current war situation), etc.
Boats in the water and boots on the ground can be popular. But it needs a credible story, told by credible sources.
I mean, we could, the issue is that it would be politically untenable. Controlling the straight means controlling Iranian territory, which means a ground invasion and occupation, which means ~2 million deployed personnel until you set up a compliant regime (because Iran, is absolutely massive). Which is why literally every other president has chosen to negotiate with them or keep them at arms length.
Jobs creation. That's another way to think about it. There are, of course, better jobs to be created than military though, but job creation is still a factor.
2. Running out of munitions is bad but it's the least bad possible problem. We know how to solve it, just pay for higher volume munition purchases. There's no suggestion the missiles don't work well. They actually are quite effective! We just spent the minimum on expendable purchases and bought new carrier groups instead.
Restocking at much much much higher volume than we just spent will cost $50-100 billion, which is not cheap, but is not THAT expensive compared to any other government program (it's like... 2% of our COVID spending). And it's actual effective reindustrialization unlike other uses of the money.
