Detecting and Countering Misuse of AI

This used to be true. As we scale the notion of agents out it can become less true.

> western liberal ideals of truth, liberty, and individual responsibility

It is said that Psychology best replicates on WASP undergrads. Take that as you will, but the common aphorism is evidence against your claim that social science is removed from established western ideals. This sounds more like a critique against the theories and writings of things like the humanities for allowing ideas like philosophy to consider critical race theory or similar (a common boogeyman in the US, which is far removed from western liberal ideals of truth and liberty, though 23% of the voting public do support someone who has an overdevleoped ego, so maybe one could claim individualism is still an ideal).

One should note there is a difference between the social sciences and humanities.

One should also note that the fear of AI, and the goal of alignment, is that humanity is on the cusp of creating tools that have independent will. Whether we're discussing the ideas raised by *Person of Interest* or actual cases of libel produced by Google's AI summaries, there is quite a bit that social sciences, law, and humanities do and will have to say about the beneficial application of AI.

We have ethics in war, governing treaties, etc. precisely because we know how crappy humans can be to each other when they do control the tools under their control. I see little difference in adjudicating the ethics of AI use and application.

This said, I do think stopping all interaction, like what Anthropic is doing here, is short sighted.

Does curating out obvious cranks from the training set not count as an alignment thing, them?

This is stated as if smart guns are being held to a different, unachievable standard. In fact, they have all the same limitations you've already pointed out (on top of whatever software is in the way), and are held to the exact same standard as "dumb" guns: when I, the owner, pull the trigger, I expect it to fire.

Users like products that behave as they expect.

Or you didn’t press it in the right spot?

Or the battery was dead?

If I’m out in the wild and in a situation where a bear is coming my way (actual situation that requires carrying a gun in certain locations) I do not want a fingerprint scanner deciding if I can or cannot use the gun. This is the kind of idea that only makes sense to people who have no familiarity with the real world use cases.

    Facial recognition: 3D Infrared
    Fingerprint: Capacitive

Try using this argument in any engineering context and observe how quickly you become untrusted for any decision making.

Arguing that something doesn’t have 100% reliability and therefore something that makes it less reliable is okay is not real logic that real people use in the real world.

Morality is complex to codify perfectly without contradictions but most/all humans are born with some sense of morality (though not necessarily each the same and not necessarily internally consistent but there are some commonalities).

Legality arose from the need to codify punishments. Ideally it would codify some form of morality the majority agrees on and without contradictions. But in practice it's written by people with various interests and ends up being a compromise of what's right (moral), what people are willing to enforce, what is provable, what people are willing to tolerate without revolting, etc.

> retaliatory murder

Murder is a legal concept and in a discussion of right and wrong, I simply call it a killing.

Now, my personal moral system has some axioms:

1) If a punishment is just, it doesn't matter who carries it out, as long as they have sufficient certainty about what happened.

2) The suffering caused by the punishment should be proportional by roughly 1.5-2 to the suffering caused to the victim (but greater punishment is acceptable is the aggressor makes it impossible to be punished proportionally).

Rape victims often want/try to commit suicide - using axiom 2, death is a proportional punishment for rape. And the victim was there so they know exactly what happened - using axiom 1, they have the right to carry out the punishment.

So even if they were not gonna be raped again, I still say they had the moral right to kill him. But of course, preventing further aggression just makes it completely clear cut.

---

> No one should take matters into their own hands

I hear this a lot and I believe it comes down to:

1) A fear that the punisher does not have sufficient proof or that aggressors will make up prior attacks to justify their actions. And those are valid fears, every tool will be abused. But the law is abused as well.

2) A belief that only the state has the right to punish people. However, the state is simply an organization with a monopoly on violence, it does not magically gain some kind of moral superiority.

3) A fear that such a system would attract people who are looking for conflict and will look for it / provoke it in order to get into positions where they are justified in hurting others. And again, this is valid but people already do this with the law or any kind of rules - do thing below the threshold of punishment repeatedly to provoke people into attacking you via something which is above the threshold.

---

BTW thanks for the links, I have read the wiki overview but I'll read it in depth tomorrow.

Many times, people are perfectly willing to commit heinous acts, but less willing to write down the laws to make them legal.

Furthermore, not exploring even the mere possibility of pain and suffering in the brain your laboratory is growing is morally reckless. Anthropic is doing the right thing here and they should not listen to the naysayers.

Not convinced "AI" is needed for this sort of around the clock pen testing - a well-defined set of rules that is being actively maintained as the threat landscape changes, and I am pretty sure there are a bunch of businesses that offer this already - but I think constant attacking is the only way to really improve security posture.

To quote one of my favourite lines in Neal Stephenson's Anathem: "The only way to preserve the integrity of the defenses is to subject them to unceasing assault".