Unironically this is a perfect example of why AI is being used to choose targets to murder in the Palestinian Genocide or in cases like DOGE attacking the functioning of the U.S. government, also US healthcare company claims of denial or collusion of landlord software to raise rent.
The economic function of AI is to abdicate responsibility for your actions so you can make a bit more money while hurting people, and until the public becomes crystal clear on that we are under a wild amount of danger.
Just substitute in for Elon the vague idea of a company that will become a legal and ethical escape goat for brutal choices by individual humans.
I did an internship at a bank way back, and my role involved a lot of processing of spreadsheets from different departments. I automated a heckton of that with Visual Basic, which my boss was okay with, but I was dismayed to learn that I wasn’t saving anyone’s time except my own, because after the internship was finished, all of the automation stuff would have to be deleted. The reason was because of a rule (I think a company policy rather than a law) that required that any code has to be the custody of someone, for accountability purposes — “accountability” in this case meaning “if we take unmaintained code for granted, then we may find an entire department’s workflow crippled at some point in the future, with no-one knowing how it’s meant to work”.
It’s quite a different thing than what you’re talking about, but in terms of the implementation, it doesn’t seem too far off.
It reminds me of how apparently firing squad executions used to have only some of the guns loaded with live guns, and the rest with blanks. This way, the executioners could do some moral gymnastics to convince themselves that they hadn’t just killed a person
The economic function of AI is to abdicate responsibility for your actions
Cars already do that without AI. If someone driving a car kills you and they aren’t drunk, they probably won’t get in any trouble and the car manufacturers never face any penalty for 40,000 deaths and 2,000,000 injuries per year they cause in the USA alone.
Which is honestly just the end game of a practice that’s been getting worse for decades. It’s partly why stuff was outsourced. The more layers between us and the atrocities, the less humanity can focus on reacting to them.
There’s been a concerted effort to introduce as many possible layers as they can to divide people and break up communities in order to break humans ability to empathize (and then use that empathy to affect change).
Lol well, Escape Goat 1 & 2 were just too damn good at being tough as nails indie platformers and now the word is hopelessly Escape Goat not Scapegoat in my head I am afraid.
Unironically this is a perfect example of why AI is being used to choose targets to murder in the Palestinian Genocide or in cases like DOGE attacking the functioning of the U.S. government, also US healthcare company claims of denial or collusion of landlord software to raise rent.
The economic function of AI is to abdicate responsibility for your actions so you can make a bit more money while hurting people, and until the public becomes crystal clear on that we are under a wild amount of danger.
Just substitute in for Elon the vague idea of a company that will become a legal and ethical escape goat for brutal choices by individual humans.
Which is why we need laws about human responsibility for decisions made by AI (or software in general).
I did an internship at a bank way back, and my role involved a lot of processing of spreadsheets from different departments. I automated a heckton of that with Visual Basic, which my boss was okay with, but I was dismayed to learn that I wasn’t saving anyone’s time except my own, because after the internship was finished, all of the automation stuff would have to be deleted. The reason was because of a rule (I think a company policy rather than a law) that required that any code has to be the custody of someone, for accountability purposes — “accountability” in this case meaning “if we take unmaintained code for granted, then we may find an entire department’s workflow crippled at some point in the future, with no-one knowing how it’s meant to work”.
It’s quite a different thing than what you’re talking about, but in terms of the implementation, it doesn’t seem too far off.
It reminds me of how apparently firing squad executions used to have only some of the guns loaded with live guns, and the rest with blanks. This way, the executioners could do some moral gymnastics to convince themselves that they hadn’t just killed a person
Cars already do that without AI. If someone driving a car kills you and they aren’t drunk, they probably won’t get in any trouble and the car manufacturers never face any penalty for 40,000 deaths and 2,000,000 injuries per year they cause in the USA alone.
Yes, good point, there is a clear through line here
Which is honestly just the end game of a practice that’s been getting worse for decades. It’s partly why stuff was outsourced. The more layers between us and the atrocities, the less humanity can focus on reacting to them.
There’s been a concerted effort to introduce as many possible layers as they can to divide people and break up communities in order to break humans ability to empathize (and then use that empathy to affect change).
FYI: Scapegoat.
Lol well, Escape Goat 1 & 2 were just too damn good at being tough as nails indie platformers and now the word is hopelessly Escape Goat not Scapegoat in my head I am afraid.