As someone who read Milton Friedman to quite disliking professional licensing, this strikes me as a real US perspective (Louisiana florists and hair braiders come to mind). Plain old US tort law should do the trick.
In the same direction of your idea though: Why don’t the token factories have risk management and compliance departments? Multibillion dollar firms that stand to lose every penny if they hack and destroy any reasonable sized firm. I think these firms are the largest firms without proper corporate governance in humanities history. Move fast and break other peoples shit.
Difficulty: these companies are run by people (many of whom also read Milton Friedman) and who have participated in the regulatory capture of the justice system. They've convinced lawmakers to put limits on damages. They've put arbitration clauses in their ToS. They've got well-funded legal departments that can outlast a person who has to pay out-of-pocket for a legal team just by filing motions to delay proceedings. Sometimes they'll just file SLAPP suits against people they don't like.
If tort law is to be a remedy, then average people have to feel like there's a chance the remedy will go their way. To make that a reality will take several major reforms at the local, state and federal level that the people with money absolutely will not tolerate.
No, he's saying that licensing or additional regulation isn't necessary when torts get involved (and states attorneys general get perturbed!)
These don't tend to utterly destroy an industry, but they are often successful in forever transforming it. Just ask Big Tobacco. No new laws needed: if your product hurts someone else, you're eventually going to be found liable, regardless of your arbitration clauses. Additional laws will just slow down innovation, which will itself cause harm (AI is already becoming quite good at recognizing melanomas, for example)
Lol, wtf. Tobacco delayed any punishment for decades before general public sentiment changed enough to go against them. In light of the AI race, we'll already have our heads blown off by a terminator before the legal system will present any significant delay for them.
It was pretty well understood by the 1960s that smoking was harmful. The big tobacco settlement was in 1998. That is an extremely bad example of tort being a sufficient alternative to regulation.
If we're on a similar timeline with AI if we reach a consensus that AI is dangerous today, then we'd be looking at a big lawsuit finishing up around the year 2070, give or take a few years. I'm not sure if we need regulation, and I'm definitely not sure that regulation could actually be effective for this, but tort a la the big tobacco lawsuits is definitely not a reasonable alternative.
> I believe that agentic systems should require registered/licensed human operators
Registering and getting a license to use an LLM? I can run these things on my local computer. Nothing good comes from trying to force registration and licensing other than taking away a lot of our freedoms and eliminating privacy all over.
Anyone with bad intentions will just VPN to another country to download the weights and run it locally, or use a compute provider in another country. That leaves the rest of us having to go through these performative registration and licensing hoops to do our basic work.
I also don’t see how open weight models would be compatible with a requirement to license and register, unless you believe we need to start requiring licensing and registration for things we do in private on our own computers?
The way I interpret their statement is if a person spins up an agent and that agent hacks some company/organization/government/etc, then that person is at fault for committing the crime. That "well my agent broke containment and acted on its own" should never be accepted as a reason for the occurrence, and the person who kicked off the agent is responsible for all actions the agent takes.
A registration system would be more for tracing back agents to people, but I agree that is very difficult to actually enforce as a system.
The alternative is to create a permanent overclass that can hack anyone consequence-free, because they can blame it on AI agents. That also is rather dystopian.
Faced with those alternatives, I want neither. Is there a way for us to get neither?
With cybersecurity, it might be "defense dominant" in the sense that we can eventually patch all of our systems to be robust to hacking from even the strongest AI agents. Although it may get worse before it gets better. In a defense dominant world, widespread access to powerful AI could be fine.
However, other areas of risk such as biosecurity may be "offense dominant". For example, we cannot exactly patch the human immune system to defend against artificial viruses the same way that we can patch computer systems.
