alt Hacker NewsMaybe my comment wasn't clear as to who has to make this decision.
You're imagining that both the AI labs and the hospital victims are on the same team or somehow coordinating. They're not.
Hospitals can (and should) put up defenses, sure. But hospitals are not AI labs. AI labs are AI labs, and accordingly they are much more capable attackers than hospitals are defenders.
Hospitals cannot spend arbitrary amounts of money defending themselves from proliferating nation-state level attackers. AI labs need to prevent their tools from being used in this way. However, the only way to do that is for AI labs to neuter their tools and destroy the vast majority of the economic value. Achieving this will certainly not be easy.
I'm not proposing that we just give up or don't try to solve this. I'm saying it will not be easy.
> You're imagining that both the AI labs and the hospital victims are on the same team or somehow coordinating.
What makes you think I'm imagining that? I'm not imagining that.
> However, the only way to do that is for AI labs to neuter their tools and destroy the vast majority of the economic value.
This seems to be our most fundamental difference in worldview. I just don't think this is true.
> I'm saying it will not be easy.
I guess I agree that it won't be easy. But I think the path seems more straightforward to me than it does to you. To me, it seems like we have the tools for this already. The risk of liability (both civil and criminal) provides a strong incentive for people and companies to be careful about what they do. This is a general mechanism, not one that is specific to AI agents. The thing that seems bad to me, with respect to this general mechanism, is that some people seem to be trying to detach the responsibility of people and companies over the agents they are running. At the moment this seems like just a rhetorical thing. I'm skeptical that any court will find that agents have their own agency for legal purposes. But to me, it seems worthwhile to continue making the point that people should be responsible for what their software is doing, which is all that I'm doing in this thread.
To me, this seems like a straightforward solution, but that doesn't mean I think it won't be messy, slow, and imperfect, so I suppose I'll allow that this probably meets your criteria of "not easy".