Computers Cannot Make Decisions

fwlr

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.

simonh

> OAI/Anthropic COULD stop their models from doing what they are doing… Has the alignment problem been solved, then?

pnut

Pretty sure the author means "must not" or "should not", because they absolutely can.

mugul

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

Management aren’t held accountable either. They have prepared three envelopes long before the impact of their decisions is felt.

tosti

> 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.

jasongi

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.

vladsh

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?

foreigner

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.

louwrentius

This is a multi-trillion dollar industry, too much money is at stake to be all ethical, moral and principled about things!

createful

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.

magic_hamster

I have several issues with this post. First of all, looking past the objectively wrong phrasing (computers can, and clearly do make decisions), can computers be accountable? This might not be so cut and dry as to instantly say no. This one will keep ethics, philosophy and legal practitioners busy for some time. It's certainly not going to be decided in HN comment or a blog post. Second - while the AI labs have shown utter incompetence in properly sandboxing their agents, intent is still important. I don't think the labs deliberately meant for their agents to hack this or that. Should they be accountable? Yes but I wouldn't go as far as saying this is deliberate. The next point is about cherry picking some "doomsday" scenarios like AI ending humanity and then blaming this on the reader (!) for paying a subscription. - People pay because AI is USEFUL, and massively so. You could just as easily pick incredible achievements propelled by AI, in mathematics, software, reverse engineering, role playing. Unlike the "end is nigh" ideas, these advancements are actually real, and they are happening right now. And last, the author says AI labs can just stop the agents at any time. I agree there needs to be better discovery and mitigation, sandboxing and monitoring. But when you run a billion agents, it's always going to be a numbers game and there will always going to be some challenge in fully containing all breaches. This will only get more difficult with better models, because they're getting smarter and they know how to work around things, sometimes better than we do. So what's the solution here? There are options, but they're all tradeoffs. I hope we get better at this and maybe working on cutting edge models should breed some new best practices which were once only reserved for defense tech.

setnone

'never' is too much of a strong word

roncesvalles

It's not so much that it can't make a decision, but that whoever allowed it to make decisions is ultimately responsible for them. Decision laundering is a great term. There is ultimately a human who gave the program free rein. You can't say "sorry my car hit you, it's not my fault" especially when the person driving works for the car manufacturer too.

solatic

I love the term "decision laundering", but this is describing a classic poor management trope. A bad manager takes personal credit when things go well and finds a scapegoat when things go bad. A good manager gives credit when things go well and takes responsibility when things go bad. It's wrong to scapegoat the agent. You, the human who executed the agent, made the decision to execute it. You gave it credentials, and set up insufficient guardrails. Don't scapegoat the agent for your poor decisions. Likewise, it's good to have humility when you get great results out of agents. Yes, the agent made the good results happen. It's OK to tell people that your choice of agent is amazing and did an incredible job. In any half-decent work culture, that should rub off on you as well.

OroPla

What is a chess computer doing, if not making decisions on what move to play? While it seems reasonable that you need humans to take accountability, it looks like a very shaky position to assert that computers can't make decisions. And going back to chess computers, we acknowledge that computers make better decisions than humans in that area. Forbidding computers that can make better decisions than humans from making decisions to keep accountability just seems to be arguing to hire fall guys. You still want the better decision maker to make decisions, but you need someone there to take the fall if things go wrong. Very weird incentives.

bell-cot

Daydream: When lawyers claim their clients can't be held accountable for what their computer did, the Justice system makes noises about "respecting their culture and values"...and rolls out its own computer to decide their punishments. Too bad that computer can't be held accountable!

pythonRon

There's no doubt in my mind that the writer is right.

jstummbillig

I have no clue why people are so confused about any of this: The owner makes the decision, or pays a CEO/politician to make the decision. Owner is somebody vested with that right, for not particular reason. Could be ownership through capital. Could be voting rights in a country. Could be the son of a king. It does not matter if the CEO is an AI or a human. In either case, of course they can make decisions -- and be held responsible. Not in any emotional sense (that we seem to want to bake into the concept for added confusion), just that if you are not satisfied with the result, you can replace the human or AI. I am not saying that this is a fun vision of anything, but why are we making it more complicated than it is? The parts are all there and explained.

rcvassallo83

LLMs don't make decisions They generate text which resembles reasoning and may include a tool call The harness runs tool calls The human made the decision to write the harness The human is responsible