Unfortunately the fact that you can't see (or understand) the quality of the components that make up your car doesn't make it less important. And low quality components can look like they're working fine until they blow up in your face.

Imagine that AI is just another tool. Imagine it's a weed whacker. Who is liable if a weed whacker destroys property?

Well, it depends. If I'm using it according to the instructions and the tool does something it's not supposed to, the manufacturer is liable. If I take a weed whacker and start cutting fiber lines with it, I'm liable.

So in accordance with standard liability practice, AI labs ought to be liable for unintended actions their products take, and the user for illegal actions they direct the product to take.

The slight caveat is that a model just produces text. It can't hack anything on its own. I would say that the product in this scenario would be the harness/agent - if you build a system that takes untrusted input (LLM output) and takes potentially dangerous action based on it, well, that sounds dangerous? Possibly negligent?

There's certainly a negligence aspect when it comes to trusting the chaos machine.

I'd like to emphasize that it's not just "don't trust it when it says to rm -fr", but even a fully constrained boolean output can be negligently-trusted if it's hooked up to something impactful.

The corporate dilemma between "I hired some less competent engineers and they're dragging the team down" and "I hired only highly capable engineers and now I have to give 10% of them bad reviews in stack ranking and later let them go"

I don't think this is a real dilemma - people hell bent on avoiding work can get by without shipping a single line of code for years.

I'm curious what the trend for whites in the US is over time. That would be a good first approximation on how much of this decline is due to culture or the educational system (including COVID disruptions) and how much is demographic change/immigration.

Doesn't seem to have incentivized cryptocurrency enthusiasts away from being in that last category for years...

Crypto never did anything is the difference? The only people it did anything for were speculative investment types.

That said bitcoin is still at like $80k per bitcoin though... so while it's not a good investment IMO (and I don't really mess around with crypto except for the time I got drunk and bought doge and made money), but there are people out there still using it. There's a bitcoin ATM less than a mile from my house.

> Crypto never did anything is the difference? The only people it did anything for were speculative investment types.

Don't forget the criminals. When it comes to crypto, never forget the criminals.

I mean, that's totally fair.

That doesn't seem untenable at all. It's perfectly consistent with legal precedent and current practice.

There are MANY cases where the government legitimately possesses personal information that could potentially cause harm if revealed, for operational as well as public safety purposes. Vehicle registration and drivers license records, for example.

This personal information is typically exempt from FOIA laws. I can't go FOIA vehicle registration records to look up where a certain driver lives, but the state and police officers do have access to that information.

A search involves access without consent. Police don't need a search warrant to perform a search with the consent of the owner. In the case of cell phone data the search is without the consent of the data owner (the phone company). In this case the municipality is collecting public-view data themselves, not without the consent of the collector, so there's no search warrant issue.

You’re missing the point. It seems like you’re saying how things “generally” are, but not how they legally should play out. For instance, among my lawyer friends, they insist that drug-sniffing dogs should require a warrant as well, and a few have said they’d happily take a case like this pro-bono to start putting the goalposts where they belong.