Three Inverse Laws of AI

Because that's likely the source of the answer it's giving you.

The third one about responsibility is the most important one, IMO. This was attributed to an IBM manual decades ago, and I think it remains the correct stance today:

> A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision.

There should be some human who is ultimately responsible for any action an AI takes. "I just let the AI figure it out" can be an explanation for a screw up, but that doesn't mean it excuses it. The person remains responsible for what happened.

Humans ARE doing this with classical computer software as well.

It's impossible to make anything fool-proof because fools are so ingenious!

> Nothing that can be described as "intelligent" can be made to be safe.

Knives aren't safe. Cars are deadly. Hair driers can electrocute you. Iron can burn you. There's a million ordinary household tools that aren't safe by your definition of the word, yet we still use them daily.

My brother was recently visiting and we were talking about software engineers, and the humanities, and manners of understanding and being in the world,

and he relayed an interaction he had a few years ago with an old friend who at the time was part of the initial ChatGPT roll out team.

The engineer in question was confused as to

- why their users would e.g. take their LLM's output as truth, "even though they had a clear message, right there, on the page, warning them not to"; and

- why this was their (OpenAI's) problem; or perhaps

- whether it was "really" a problem.

At the heart of this are some complicated questions about training and background, but more problematically—given the stakes—about the different ways different people perceive, model, and reason about the world.

One of the superficial manners in which these differences manifest in our society is in terms of what kind of education we ask of e.g. engineers. I remain surprised decades into my career that so few of my technical colleagues had a broad liberal arts education, and how few of them are hence facile with the basic contributions fields like philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, sociology, psychology (cognitive and social), etc., and how those related in very real very important ways to the work that they do and the consequences it has.

The author of these laws does may intend them as aspirational, or otherwise as a provocation to thought, rather than prescription.

But IMO it is actively non-productive to make imperatives like these rules which are, quite literally, intrinsically incoherent, because they are attempt to import assumptions about human nature and behavior which are not just a little false, but so false as to obliterate any remaining value the rules have.

You cannot prescribe behavior without having as a foundation the origins and reality of human behavior—not if you expect them to be either embraced, or enforceable.

The Butlerian Jihad comes to mind not just because of its immediate topicality, but because religion is exactly the mechanism whereby, historically, codified behaviors which provided (perceived) value to a society were mandated.

Those at least however were backed by the carrot and stick of divine power. Absent such enforcement mechanisms, it is much harder to convince someone to go against their natural inclinations.

Appeals to reason do not meaningfully work.

Not in the face of addiction, engagement, gratification, tribal authority, and all the other mechanisms so dominant in our current difficult moment.

"Reason" is most often in our current world, consciously or not, a confabulation or justification; it is almost never a conclusion that in turn drives behavior.

Behavior is the driver. And our behavior is that of an animal, like other animals.

Aviation learned this the hard way, that automation should be adapted to how humans actually work and not on how we wish we worked.