there is so much drama around open source and pull requests, mostly because people somehow became fork-phobic.
so the new model is just great: fork the repo and do whatever you want. git a distributed system so best case scenario the original repository owner can still merge the changes. also if the original developer used a decent license they will also have legal rights to do so.
Unironically, i have experienced this unwillingly.
I am a westerner and recently traveled to some science conference and casually met this Indian girl (living in India, she travelled to the conference as well), about 24 years old and we clicked immediately. We ended up talking a lot and we had vastly more aligned life goals (having kids, starting a family etc) than i have with my average western female co-workers or women i meet outside work.
Unironically I’m starting to believe i might have to move east if i want to start a family.
Weird nobody’s mentioning “self-made man” by nora vincent, written after experiencing a whole year living as a man. That experience gave her such a depression she ended up taking her own life.
the netbsd gallery (https://netbsd.org/gallery/) had a picture of somebody using that on windows xp (iirc) in order to compile pkgsrc packages in a "posix compliant" environment. the picture seem to be gone now :(
Except now there's no longer any guarantees there's even any people you can point at. It's already often diffuse responsbilitiy. Maybe today you can still sort of get around that by pointing at business/organization owners. But soon we're going to see situations where that isn't even realistic. For example if AI agents start spinning up their own agents which work outside of the control of anyone. We're going to need some way to deal with that.
Agents run on computers, those computers have owners. We have to maintain accountability and not let people who stand to get rich from privatizing the profits but socializing the risk of rogue agents from continuing to push a narrative of autonomous super intelligence that is “too powerful” to control.
That narrative is bullshit. Intelligence is not power. The power comes from hooking these agents up to everything without proper safety controls. The fact that those safety controls don’t exist yet is not humanity’s problem, it’s the frontier labs problem, and we can’t let them wriggle out of it with an Overton window shift or demanding that the government take responsibility via regulation (of course they should but it doesn’t absolve the labs of responsibility for their own actions).
Right, but if the agents broke into the computers and are hosting themselves there without the owners knowledge, are the owners responsible? We'd say whoever originated them is responsible, but what if that can no longer be determined?
Yes, like pretty much everything else, there is gray area. We can have split liabilities for different aspects of these failures. It's long been the case that people may not know what's running on their computers (botnets, etc), and I would argue there should be some form liability for your computer being used to do bad things. It should be proportionate and obviously a lot less than the principals. But keep in mind these rogue AI agents can't just hang out on someone's personal hardware, they need a lot of compute.
The missing piece right now is that our AI safety and cybersecurity controls are simply not up to snuff with the current risks that AI has introduced. Given the increased risk, we need to level up every aspect of our cybersecurity stance. These are hard problems, but not impossible given proper incentives. The issue is that no one is connecting the dots between the creation of these agents and the tools and access they are given, with the harm they may produce. Often the argument jumps straight to "it's going to get too smart for us to control" while glossing over the fact that all the power AI has was directly given to it by human choices. All this cognitive dissonance and willful blindness is caused by unchecked capitalist incentives. Think of the amount of money every single person in the frontier labs stands to make if the most optimistic predictions pan out. This is moral hazard of the highest order, and the only counter-measure that can work in our current social and political system is liability.
> Agents run on computers, those computers have owners.
and catering to them (boxes) to not accidentally start disseminating child porn is most commonly understood as a responsibility of the owner, the moment he plugs his device online.
This is also why legal action must be taken against OpenAI for the Hugging Face incident, as well as any similar incidents. Their computer, their programs, their responsibility.
Why would that need a new way? Or do you mean that no-one ever spun up anything at all (e.g., agent zero was never spun up or allowed to be spun up by anyone)?
yup.
the rural town i'm originally from is down from ~9500 residents to a bit more than 6000 (and trending down).
reply