I’m trying to imagine where a Waymo passenger (the one “operating” the vehicle, commanding the AI to drive from A to B) being held responsible for the car doing something illegal on the way to achieve that goal.
Do you really think that the passenger should be responsible for how the car/agent achieves the goal, when they only set the destination?
Giving passenger override controls and monitoring seems to defeat the purpose of self driving cars if you’re still required to hold a driver license to use them.
Let's continue with the analogy, so in the event of a Waymo running over a pedestrian - who is held responsible?
Probably not the end user, who ordered the Waymo and couldn't reasonably foresee it running somebody over, with the expectation that that the Waymo would legally reach its destination. If the end user tampered with it, they should be held responsible.
An OpenAI team giving an unblocked model access to a lax harness, with instructions to find and exploit cyber bugs in a game exercise, there is probably a reasonable expectation that they can foresee the consequences. With consumer guardrails, it would not have happened.
This isn't about putting constraints on consumers and typical end users, which already have safety filters and use the product with the knowledge that it won't root their machine or start a botnot, but keeping dangerous test runs and other actors experimenting with unsafe harnesses accountable.
But it is an interesting question. When I, a typical user, use a harness and I give an innocuous prompt to my agent in its container, like making a certain refactor, and it somehow escapes and then begins a mass bot attack, there should we more grace given. As agents become more stateful and long-lived, it gets muddy.
The different is who's operating. In one case you only tell the car to get from a to b, in the other case you explicitly instruct the ai to do things. If the ai causes damages, I'd say it depends on what you prompted. Did you try to find a security hole in system X, or did you ask it for harmless information (in which case rather the ai vendor might be held accountable).
All this is not how the legal system might or might not work, of course.
Yes. The user of a machine is responsible for due diligence before the decision to use the machine. Unless the operational limitations and fault rate of the machine is withheld from the public.
TBH I don't really think another new technology we haven't figured out the ethics of, as an example, is going to get you very far in way of insights ...
Waymo Inc is operating the vehicle. They do it on behalf of the passengers.
When you run an agent on your computer, that's equivalent to installing self driving software into your manually driven car, i.e. something like comma.ai.
Comma.ai might be fully safe to operate autonomously on a mining site or a corporate parking lot, but maybe not in city traffic.
If you use it in problematic scenarios, that is on you.