We aren’t going to do that because intent matters. You need to control your dog and there should be penalties if you don’t, but if your dog bit someone because you didn’t control it properly, that’s not the quite the same as if you bit someone.
Another analogy: a zoo is responsible for protecting the public, and should be reponsible if an animal escapes and hurt someone. But a zoo employee wouldn’t have the same kind of responsibility for that incident as if they attacked someone themselves.
If someone died, there’s a difference between manslaughter and murder.
Nowadays, it’s common for bad things to happen due to systemic problems. It sucks but that’s the modern condition. When that happens, the answer is to fix the system and scapegoating employees is a rather indirect way of doing that.
Sorry I disagree with that. This is more like gain of function research. You are trying to develop an agent with the ability to do hacking and the like without having proper safeguards. When it breaks free and causes massive damage, the lab is at fault. Or do you think "we were just trying to help" is an excuse to kill millions of people too? This isn't an alligator wondering down main street, this is an agent that could potentially ruin lives and is being actively trained to do hacking in an adversarial testing environment trying to push its limits to develop that ability. Furthermore, the people doing it have seen it cause similar problems in the past, and now have concrete evidence they cannot properly control it. So I think pressing the "play" button effectively transfers responsibility and liability to them for doing so.
In fact the people pressing the play button are the ones telling us it cannot be controlled, it is a threat to human and national security, and warning us of the impending damages they are about to cause. I'd say we've established motive (profit at the cost of safety).
To abuse your metaphor: if the zoo was genetically modifying animals to give them enhanced abilities to escape and kill, and then putting them into an escape room with a reward for escaping / killing, then they would be liable for doing so if the animal went on to kill. Just the same as a trained fighting dog bite is different than an accidental bite from an otherwise peaceful animal (you turned the dog into this monster, now its your fault).
I think an alligator wandering down main street is worse than anything that happened at OpenAI so far, but everyone agrees it's a warning shot and could get worse.
Millions of people seems, uh, much worse than that. The Ukraine war is estimated at 2 million casualties.
See bio containment labs in the US. We do do it and we can do it and your fatalism is either misplaced or pushing an agenda.
What fatalism? OpenAI has already made security improvements and they will make more. I also think having common standards for containment might help.
Even with your dog analogy... if my dog bites someone, it's not the same as if I bit someone. But what about the second time my dog bites someone, when I already knew it had done it once?
> But what about
At the very least your dog stands a good chance of being put down.
Yes, clearly that's worse than the first time.