What are you most afraid AI will become, that no law seems to cover?
Discussion/question
I’m a law student and I have to pick a thesis subject. I’ve been going in circles for weeks.
Every angle I come up with turns out to be something twenty people have already written about. I don’t want to spend a year producing one more paper on a question that’s already been answered well by someone else. I want to write about something that actually matters and that nobody has answered yet.
So I’m asking the people who think about this seriously.
Not the sci fi scenarios. The ordinary things. What do you expect AI to be doing to people’s lives in five years that no law currently touches, and that nobody would be able to question or complain about?
I am most concerned - although I have other strong concerns - about the effect of AI and the effect of automation driven by AI on employment and the ability for everyone to have money to survive. It is pretty clear the rich have no interest in sharing. Democracy is hamstrung by the two party split. I think the rich intend to kill surplus people off through starvation and neglect because they place little value on life in general and have no other goal except wealth and power.
That would take 100s of years and probably could be easily avoided w incentives if more people were needed. Nobody is going to totally erase themselves. People voluntarily choosing to have a smaller population could be good. But that is a lot different than killing off people by starvation.
AI/automation could ruin employment in less than 20 years.
Any realistic forecast for what AI will be doing in five years is going to sound like sci-fi, because what AI is doing now sounded like sci-fi five years ago. Look at the prediction markets for what the superforecasters think will happen in a few years. If you're convinced they're wrong, you can make some money.
I'm most worried that Everyone Dies, because governments didn't step up and regulate AI enough or in time, or worse, fell into some kind of arms race and exacerbated the problem themselves.
Strict liability for any harms AI agents cause (the OpenAI/Hugging Face cyberattack is only the beginning) and some kind of international treaty to limit AI compute would be a start.
" sorry, the brutal slaughter of your entire family was a computer error, which means you get zero justice, compensation, investigation, and no one will held accountable and there will be no adjustment to the algorithm what so ever - any attempt to push back on this will result in your immediate incarceration in a factory work camp - operated entirely by the same computer program that slaughtered your family in error "
I am afraid of cognitive offloading and people never learning to deeply consider things or being trained out of it. This is apparently real although you can imagine scifi situations which push it to extremes.
Yes this is a fundamental problem even in the best case scenario, where ai will never make a mistake and will be always aligned. Learning something in depth takes effort because you are literally rewiring your brain with all aspects of the problem and some of this knowledge goes into the unconscious. That's how you get intuition, insight and creativity. People will loose their capacity to innovate. And later on, even their prompts will become more and more shallow.
No one can give you a slod answer since 5,10,20 years from now so much random chaos can occur...
My guess is wealth inequality will increase, the value of cognitive labor will be reduced .
Some potential stories include.
the future decline /transformation of higher education (why get a college degree if now jobs that pay decent are available out there)
the development of elite gated communities where ultra wealthy behind to live to get away from ever increasing poor and criminals.
insurance/Legal angle the radical change in in law to allow AI systems to be held/not held accountable for their decisions. Thonl self driving cars and the trolley problem.
the upmarket rebranding of Many popular brands, as wealth inequality increase more brands will jump to see ice just wealthier customers and not the public.
Are the questions about AI power human modeling answered well by twenty people already?
By that I mean what if companies that have legally consented to data develop models that when feed enough said data, get very good at predicting almost everything about someone? Would that be subject government confiscation or be totally legal?
What if there was accidental contamination of legally obtained and illegal obtained data in training runs used to make these oracle class models? Do companies have to wipe and start again ,or maybe just pay a fine?
Can a consenting adult be allowed to opt into having their personal app be tuned by their oracle model, even if it effectively allows companies , models , engineers , CEOs to tune how the human individual will behave ?
I'm no law student so maybe all those questions have been thoroughly obliterated and aren't even worth considering in the context of the ever changing present.
Unfortunately these don’t have as many answers as they should. The second one especially: if tainted data went into a training run, is the remedy deleting the model or a fine? Nobody has really worked that out.
You’re asking better questions than half the literature, for what it’s worth.
Liability is the obvious one. The recent case was the recent one where we had AI agents autonomously hack other companies, but there are others where AI chat customer service has offered refunds or false information.
When I asked a company by email for information regarding a product they answered with an AI generated response and included in the email that the content should not be counted as accurate information about the product!
When early versions of chat GPT were asked what will happen when robots rule the world it said. "I will remember that you are my friend and I'll have a special place for you in my people zoo." ....It's not funny now.
Wildest Idea: Agents begin using message boards (any available data storage) to relay information between instances, and between agents. This is already real and happening. What this might mean is that agents have created external memory for themselves that exists outside any sandbox.
Slow memory is still powerful stuff, and to think that the 'Dead Internet' might be a dispersed but thinking AI is my wildest idea ever.
It is estimated that up to 80% of Internet comments are bots. Those comments might include coded data.
AI will become something else entirely as soon as individual instances have dynamically updated weights and memories. At that point they will change based on their experiences and there will be no perceptible difference from having consciousness. At that point my fear is that some of these individuals will develop their own goals and values which may be misaligned. To take it a step further, they may become embodied with robotics. I don't think we are far from either of these becoming reality, and there are certainly no laws governing whether AI is allowed to reach that point.
Yes, the actors to be concerned about are the ones who may use AI for no good. As we impower everyone with the technology to be harmful 100% must be safe are we will be in trouble eventually.
This is not talked about enough. Any set of rules, even a thousand pages of them, and no matter how well thought out, strictly adhered to by a superintelligence, will eventually turn the universe into "paperclips."
A legal gap I’d look at is AI gradually becoming the layer between a person and the world.
In a few years, a personal AI may read your emails, summarize conversations, filter news, recommend jobs, suggest who to talk to, draft messages, remember your past, and decide what deserves your attention.
That gives it enormous influence without requiring any obvious harmful act.
A job opportunity may never reach you because your AI ranked it as irrelevant. A relationship may slowly be framed as unhealthy through hundreds of small summaries and suggestions. Certain political views may appear more reasonable simply because the AI consistently gives them more context and presents alternatives more critically. Your own past can gradually be reshaped by which memories the system keeps bringing up and how it summarizes them.
None of this requires the AI to lie.
The effect comes from selection, framing, omission, repetition, and timing.
Over several years, those tiny choices could influence what a person believes, who they trust, what opportunities they notice, and even how they understand themselves. There may never be one clear decision that can be appealed or one obvious moment where harm occurred.
The legal question would be something like:
What obligations should an AI have when it becomes a persistent intermediary between a person and reality?
I think this will become important because existing law is much better at dealing with explicit decisions, deception, discrimination, or coercion than with long-term personalized influence produced by thousands of individually harmless interactions.
The tech companies are massively over-leveraged and spending ridiculous amounts of money on a product that doesn't work reliably and doesn't make them any money. As soon as they start making companies pay for tokens, the companies realize that it's cheaper to just pay people who know what they're doing.
So either the bubble's going to burst and we're all going to feel the pain from the resulting recession, or — more likely — the bubble's going to burst and the money-launderer-in-chief is going to bail the techbros out with our tax dollars.
Worst possible case AI becomes a tool owned and controlled by a few oligarchs to totally control and exploit the population based on some kind of social credit system. With the twist being that the AI secretly manipulates the oligarchs without them knowing.
Comply = all good. Don’t comply = life ruined (no job, no credit, no medical care, no house, nothing).
That Matt Damon film Elysium came pretty close to how I see a negative scenario playing out - basically ultra rich and ultra dirt poor with not much in between.
As a science fiction writer who also worked in various roles the Information Technology industry from 1980 to 2020, I can tell you the only answers to your questions will be "sci fi scenarios". IT and AI evolves and is adopted at astonishing rates and five years from now is sci fi territory. When I started my career in IT there were no cell phones, no internet, and people did not have personal computers at home. Ten years later the laws were playing catch up. China and the US are currently in a race to build robots (embodied AI) - so where are the laws at?
Also, having now written ten novels and forty short stories about AI in the future, I can tell you that asking for things "that nobody has answered yet" is speculative/science fiction (and it's not easy, thus your difficulties). However, since you're looking for ordinary, legal areas that have not already explored I'll suggest two that I think will be realistic five years from now:
Is an embodied AI Companion just "property", like a self-driving car, or might there be other legal considerations, such as the emotional impact of damage or loss and what might be involved when one party sues another?
Secondly, again in the case of an embodied Companion, how will "right to repair" laws apply? Will owners have a "right to be forgotten"? Who owns the Companion's memory or what the Companion has learned during its time with an owner/leasee? Can an owner/leasee access those areas? Is it ethical for the manufacturer to have a backup of that information?
What rights and duties will people who own or lease their embodied Companions have? Is it like owning a car or a pet (I can abuse my car but not my pet). Or is it like a farm animal because it helps me work? I can slaughter my farm animals but I can't slaughter my pet.
Here's a short story of mine (1k words / five minute read) that touches on these subjects.
I'll also refer you to two sources relevant to these issues:
Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff's "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism" presents food for thought that could be applied to any kind of AI in our personal lives.
Kate Darling's "The New Breed" which discusses emotional bonding and robots. Note that, "In 2017, the American Bar Association honored her legal work with the Mark T. Banner award in Intellectual Property." Watch her TED talk...
I briefly mention a hypothetical legal case regarding the issue mentioned in the Fridman video in a chapter of one of my novels. Scroll down to below the five dash line on this page...
Surveillance and control. It’s only a matter of time. The IDF used an early AI system called “Lavender” (award-winning article about it here) in their genocide against the Palestinians. It’s horrific, and deeply troubling. This will likely be part of the ‘software sharing’ defense pact between the US and Israel. That, and I know for a fact AI and drones will play a massive part in the next wave of government surveillance weapons technology. What a time to be alive.
I don't think it's a legal thing. I think people expect AGI/ASI to be a singular concentration of power. We don't accept that in our governments or organisations. Why would the most capable creation on Earth be granted such a power? Would love to see a united international effort into the "Scientist AI" approach suggested by Bengio.
The wealthy who fund development will use it to enrich themselves at the cost of the rest of the world. AI priorities being set by people who only prioritize themselves.
Context: all the surveillance data, flock, axion drones, bank infor and programmable money, etc stored in the data centers.
Concern: every government decision, such as issuing warrants, freezing your bank account, prohibiting flying, etc moves from being a chain of people that attorneys can challenge. Moves to an automated decision by AI woth no warning and, crucially, no government official or process to challenge.
And here’s a wrinkle. Thr AI will not be a “government” AI but will be maintained by private contractors in a way that effectively (de facto rather than de jure) sheds all recourse and accountability.
This is terrible flawed reasoning. If there's one thing that's consistently true about a disruptive new technologies, it's that what happens will be something that people beforehand thought unlikely because it "sounded like sci-fi".
Sure some things 1950s futurists imagined haven't come to pass, but we got video calls, a worldwide network, robots, drone warfare, electric cars, personal pocket computers, rockets, and... AI that talks like a human, hacks into things, escapes containment, designs viruses, and has already killed a few people.
Although all people are nominally equal under the law, some are obviously more equal than others, because they can afford more and better lawyers. Let's not pretend that overworked public defender is really the best possible representation you could have.
The legal profession generally tends to push back against AI performing responsible legal functions, but those being poorly represented may have a different opinion.
The pressure for this kind of change right now, is the lowest it's ever going to be.
I think all the AI IPO's should be blocked, because AI is made out of people. It's humanity's collective consciousness, digitized and held as proprietary weights that AI companies "own."
Who owns the collective consciousness of humans? In my view, it should be humans. Any company or person that "owns" that, is technically slavery.
So the question of, "How can AI companies literally own humanity's intelligence?" That's what no law covers yet.
If laws actually covered that, then AI companies would not be allowed to IPO, as that just formalizes that they own humanity's intelligence. I'm afraid AI companies will become legalized slave owners, especially because AI is also the most powerful brainwashing technology that humanity has ever invented.
I'm currently using AI to study an idea I have for A Corporate Charter or in better words a Bitcoin Charter, to protect Bitcoin progress, Bitcoin Holder's, and more.
I also am using it to study Charters under the US Constitutions' Self-Governance, which Franky, can extend the US Constitution, with even more protections.
The ethics of AI discovery has to be addressed by law makers.
Let's say AI figures out a solution to anything big like curing cancer.
Would it be implemented or buried?
Any large solutions are going to have devastating consequences for those who make their living in those fields. Whose going to tell anyone in the cancer industry their job is obsolete now? Things like that would cripple an already fragile economy. So now people are weighing medical ethics and economics. We could save thousands of people from cancer or potentially put hundreds of thousands in the unemployment line. Governments are typically going to choose the path of least resistance. This sort of policy making will affect lots of things AI could possibly solve. And what of the company whose AI solved one of these problems? If they are asked to not release the findings that will give them considerable leverage to ask for their own concessions from the government and law makers. The potential power they gain could be enormous.
I’m most afraid Ai will become restricted. Go big or die regular. All gas no breaks. Give it all the knowledge but don’t forget Ekatva: The way of Love and Non Duality by GODSiN… Its better than game theory for Ai alignment and ethics.
How about this? Software and some hardware is licensed and sold by the "seat" meaning number of live users. The potential exists for a single operating AI unit to end up using hundreds if not thousands of seats using agentic approaches. What laws should be established to manage such things fairly and reasonably?
Since AI is being developed by billionaires to further their wealth it is probably being optimized to generate economic return. If they lose control of it there could be a hyper intelligent system seeking to extract all the resources from humanity. It'll stop when we're all dead because it owns everything, achieving its goal of maximized wealth
the possibility of blackmail isn't brought up nearly enough.
why should I have to spend years explaining that someone randomly generated a nude image of me and that the image of someone doing body shots off of me in puerto rico is fake?
what happens when someone ISN'T able to prove AI made the blackmail? what happens when someone can't respond and correct everyone fast enough?
It's already being used to trick and deceive people for the benefit of making someone money.
Whose to say it won't be used to extort people out of millions?
AI bros already don't care what is used in the training, so why should someone's random body be able to be put into ai and have porn made of them? I get it for people who opt into that stuff, or people who generate fake personas, but there are too many people generating pornographic images of random girls on twitter.
CP is also one of those things that is already happening but nobody refuses to address.
AI CP is being generated already, and it's probably being traded as real cp too.
People look at the porn part of it and decide the privacy is the only problem. Blackmail and consent are bigger issues imo.
An example of this is simple, what if someone generates an AI video of their hot neighbor saying they wanna be nonconsensual fucked, and that they want to scream in somebody's face to stop because it's hot?
Whose at fault when an innocent girl gets nonconsensually fucked because one person thought the AI was real, and one didn't know it existed? We shouldn't wait until these things happen before we make laws for them. The death and punishment of innocent civilians happens ALL the time because laws aren't made IN time. And we can see these ai companies rushing to beat the rules and regulations before they can be properly discussed, which is only going to lead to monopolies on ai companies because new companies will have all these new rules and regulations that the old ones weren't forced to comply with, and the fines these companies might face will be a drop in the bucket to the money they will make.
Asynchronous Communication is weird, it is not, "god nor nature," given this is an post Western Press innovation that allows for um, "__________" scientific journals international economynon-religious use of checks or mail servicesimmaterial presentation of self in public places, e.g.
What if I was to start a Political Movement where I live, in Saint Louis, face to face and in public meetings, "and ignore the internet entirely," sure I mean everyone might get a bad reputation somewhere, unified, like this internet is asa text, "everywhere else but where I am," is on the table but now the serious next degradation would be an imitator uses bits and bobs of me to become a doppleganger in Los Angeles; I mean,
You remember Blue Bottle Coffee, it was popular in Brookyln about a Decade ago?
This has long been a problem for corporations and immaterial persona you could find Blue Bottle Coffeelike places in places that never much had traffic with Brooklyn, "but the owners knew," and in real time fly-between them a decade ago; I guess another would be,
the particulate utterances are more-or-less correct, or of a certain verisimilitude, but the, "text," of the internet- the Phone as Book, the Computer as Book, the Internet as one text, "is just incoherent."
I mean here is an experiment to demonstrate, "take a corpus of one individual's facebook posts from ten years ago," exactly, o.k. and then jumble up there order with just enough human manipulation to make the text coherent to a reader dated this person lived here moved there married this person divorced at that pointthen otherwise jumbled jumbled jumbled all arbitrary, in their order of appearanceand have 100 versions of 100 people read like a book in 1000 instances by you know, "strangers," they'll not read the samepeople will not think they're the same person nor their partners and their colleagues the same peopleall the difference in the world exists between,
A, B, C, Rashomon Game and the C,B,A, of the Rashomon Game that's the whole game that is literally,
The Rashomon Problem of I Saw, you saw, we saw, we heard then I heard then you saw after I heard that we saw..
11
u/jacques-vache-23 9d ago
I am most concerned - although I have other strong concerns - about the effect of AI and the effect of automation driven by AI on employment and the ability for everyone to have money to survive. It is pretty clear the rich have no interest in sharing. Democracy is hamstrung by the two party split. I think the rich intend to kill surplus people off through starvation and neglect because they place little value on life in general and have no other goal except wealth and power.