Freedom of religion gets out of a lot, but there are limits and this is likely one. (and most countries don't have nearly as much freedom of religion - if any.)
That is pretty typical. You will spend potentially millions in court/lawyer fees going to a jury trial beyond whatever the end verdict is: if you can figure this out without a jury it saves you a lot of costs. Most companies only go to a jury when they really think they will win, or the situation is so complex nobody can figure out what a fair settlement is. (Ford is a famous counter example: they fight everything in front of a jury - they spend more and get larger judgements often but the expense of a jury trial means they are sued less often and so it overall balances out to not be any better for them. I last checked 20 years ago though, maybe they are different today)
At some point they have to say "if we can't make this safe we can't do it at all". LLMs are great for some things, but if they will do this type of thing even once then they are not worth the gains and should be shutdown.
No they don't, if we're going to start saying that we can't use any technology. If someone is mentally ill to the point where they are on the verge of suicide nothing is safe.
If they're going to curtail LLMs there'd need to be some actual evidence and even then it would be hard to justify winding them back given the incredible upsides LLMs offer. It'd probably end up like cars where there is a certain number of deaths that just need to be tolerated.
Your car analogy only proves the opposite. We don't "tolerate" road deaths because they are a fundamental law of physics. We only tolerate them because we've spent a century under-investing in safer alternatives like robust public transit and walkable infrastructure, people have given up.
Claiming we have to accept a death quota for LLMs just assumes that the current path of the technology is the only path possible. If a tech comes with systemic risk, the answer isn't to just shrug our shoulders and go "oh well, some people may die but it's worth it to use this tech." The answer is to demand a different architecture and better guardrails and oversight before it gets scaled to the entire public.
Cars are also subject to strict regulations for crash testing, we have seatbelt laws, speed limits, and skill/testing based licensing. All of these regulations were fought against by the auto industry at the time. Want to treat LLMs like cars? Cool, they are now no longer allowed to be released to the public until they've passed standardized safety tests.
> If someone is mentally ill to the point where they are on the verge of suicide nothing is safe.
This is a perspective born only from ignorance. Life can wear down anyone, even the strong. I find there may come a time in anyone's life where they are on the edge, staring into an abyss.
At the same time - and this is important - suicidality can pass with time and depression can be treated. Being suicidal is not a death sentence and it just isn't true that "nothing is safe". The important thing is making sure there's no bot "helpfully" waiting to push someone over the cliff or confirm their worst illusions at the worst possible time.
Can you imagine what driving cars would look like if they would be only (self-)regulated by VC-backed startups like we see so far with this new technology?
Would there be seatbelts, speedbumps, brake signals, licenses or speed limits?
This obviously isn't a binary question. Sure we cars have benefits but we don't let anyone ducktape a V8 to a lawnmower, paint flames over it and sell it to kids promising godlike capabilities without annoying "safety features".
Economic benefits can not justify the deaths of people, especially as this technology so far only benefits a handful of people economically. I would like to see the evidence (of benefits to the greater society that I see being harmed now) before we unleash this thing freely and not the other way around.
>Economic benefits can not justify the deaths of people
This is a absurd standard. Humans wouldn't be able to use power stations, cars, knives, or fire! Everything has inherent risk and we shouldn't limit human progress because tiny fractions of the population have issues.
It's not an absurd standard at all. Risks are quantifiable, and not binary.
But the absurdity is that there is a long and tragic history of using economic benefits as an excuse for products and services that cause extreme and widespread harm - not just emotional and physical, but also economic.
We are far too tolerant of this. The issue isn't risk in some abstract sense, it's the enthusiastic promotion of death, war, sickness, and poverty for "rational" economic reasons.
Fun fact but the creator of the seat-belt actually gave his patent for free
> This is Nils Bohlin, an engineer at Volvo.[0]
He invented the three-point seat belt in 1959.
Rather than profit from the invention, Volvo opened up the patent for other manufactorers to use for no cost, saying "it had more value as a free life saving tool than something to profit from"
We don't ban bridges, but we do install suicide barriers, emergency phones, nets on the bridges. We practice safety engineering. A bunch of suicides on a bridge is a design flaw of that bridge, and civil engineers get held accountable to fix it.
Plus, a bridge doesn't talk to you. It doesn't use persuasive language, simulate empathy, or provide step-by-step instructions for how to jump off it to someone in crisis.
I know a few people who work 3rd shift. That is people who good reason to be up all night in their local timezone. They all sleep during times when everyone else around them is awake. While this is a small minority, this is enough that your scheme will not work.
I actually was considering those people. That’s part of why I suggested it shouldn’t be a hard cut-off, but just adding to the end of the messages.
Of course, one could add some sort of daily schedule feature thing so that if one has a different sleep schedule, one can specify that, but that would be more work to implement.
We can perhaps say this is a first time thing, so give a small fine this time. However those should be with the promise that if there is a next time the fine will be much bigger until Google stops doing this.
My companies makes potentially dangerous things like lawn mowers. We have a long set of training on how to handle safety issues that gets very complex. Our rules about safety issues is "design it out, then guard it out, and finally warn it out" - that is an ordered list so we cannot go to the next step until we take the previous as far as we can. (and every once in a while we [or a competitor] realize something new and have to revisit everything we sell for that new idea)
Courts will see these things for a while, but there have been enough examples of this type of thing that all AI vendors needs to either have some protection in their system. They can still say "we didn't think of this variation, and here is why it is different from what we have done before", but they can't tell the courts we had no idea people would do stupid things with AI - it is now well known.
I expect this type of thing to play out over many years in court. However I expect that any AI system that doesn't have protection against the common abuses like this that people do will get the owners fined - with fines increasing until they are either taken offline (because the owners can't afford to run them), or the problem fixed so it doesn't happen in the majority of cases.
It doesn't have to be a certified install company in many places, it just needs to be inspected which most states will do for homeowners. (if your area is different contact your representative)
UL or other certification is a very good idea. They can't automatically deny coverage for lack of certification, but it becomes a much harder fight for you to prove the non-certified equipment wasn't at fault.
Is it? I have long thought that most things business people are using a spreadsheet for belongs someplace else. They are easy ways to run quick what-ifs or make lists, but generally the right answer is update the system so they don't need a spreadsheet. If the data is financials - why can't your accounting system give everyone the view they need from the shared system? Othertimes what they really need are a database to track this. But a spreadsheet is easy and so they ignore all the problems it creates because it needs a real engineer (and often more money than they can spend) to create the right solution.
> it needs a real engineer (and often more money than they can spend) to create the right solution.
Then it's the wrong solution. Period.
There are plenty of annoyances with spreadsheets, but part of what makes them so robust and powerful is that they don't take a ton of specialized knowledge, and they remain incredibly flexible.
An expensive, complicated, static, "right" solution for a small business is folly (honestly - this stays true up to medium/large business). It's a ton of time and energy focused on the absolute wrong thing. When a spreadsheet can reach the same result in a fraction of the time.
Especially given the result may not actually be that important, and they pivot to something else entirely in the very near future.
I've worked at several startups. I'd caution even software startups from assuming that custom solutions are the right approach. They usually aren't. They're a waste of time and effort that ends up saddling you with a brittle, expensive solution designed to solve problems from last year.
You are missing something: how much is spent because the spreadsheet isn't the right solution - nobody measures this (or even knows how). How much are you risking because spreadsheets are not robust - when will a mistake catch up, and what will be the cost? There is a reason accountants use double entry bookkeeping, and spreadsheets don't have that.
Nobody has the money to spend doing things right unless they have been burned. That doesn't mean the money shouldn't be spent first.
Spreadsheets are powerful I will grant. However they are not robust. A robust system works very different and includes features (like tests) that your spreadsheet doesn't have (I don't if it could have them, but it is safe to guess they don't)
I didn't quite mean it that way. My question is basically asking "Does this hammer know that not every problem is a nail". To give a specific answer to your question, my accounting system is excel, and "everyone" is me. There are definitely plenty of places where a database makes sense. But it's also important for database engineers to understand where databases don't make sense. It's kind of like that old problem we had where people would keep on saying "We can do X with blockchain" and the typical answer is "ok but that's worse".
There are plenty of reasons that a department within a company will prefer spreadsheets. Software is not the answer to everything and also this is the same problem you get when Microsoft introduces those pesky 'Power App' developers etc or previously the Sharepoint 'web parts' etc....essentially someone who kind of feels they are the 'owner' of some information then decides to formalise the process in their own little way.
Now you have a person wasting a bit of time making their little tool but you've also got people complaining that someone's now essentially taken control of it etc. At a former employer our procurement team used spreadsheets to track basically everything but importantly everything on our PCBs - every single component and their suppliers and prices etc (various factories around China usually). This would have been a horrible thing to try and formalise in a web app just because of how often they were all changing their own conventions etc (often suppliers changing what information they gave to them, too). It would have been a wild goose chase to formalise it and more than the trouble it would be worth.
Engineer B who can get that over complex solution working is the person you will turn to when complexity is required for the problem. They have experience in getting it to work, and such they really are worth more.
The real question is how do you tell engineer A who can figure out how to make the complex problems simple from engineer C who can't handle complexity and so writes simple solutions when the complex one is needed.
Not really, because even when complexity is required, the last thing you want is even more, unneeded complexity. There is no guarantee that the kind of complexity B brought to a problem is the exact same kind you're going to need somewhere else. It turns out that complexity is, shall we say, more complex than that.
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