A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
Even something day-to-day like a simple "AI" that tweaks grocery-store prices harms some people to some degree when it raises prices.
People and current "AIs" violate the first law all the time, or they'd be paralyzed into inaction. Most decisions of any importance end up hurting somebody in some way.
The 3 laws are a simplification -- a dangerous gross oversimplification. They're just something an author dreams up with his author buddies during a night of drinking, not something that just needs tweaking to make it work.
Occam warns us to make things as simple as possible, but his very next few words warn against oversimplification.
Technically, scooters are powered and thus aren't allowed on the sidewalk, but LA cops aren't keen to wade into this so they just ignore the entire issue -- like they pretty much ignore anything that happens off the roadway. Scooters, electric-assist bicycles, etc rule the sidewalks.
Quite a few [hundreds of $thousands]. We also have to pay for janitorial services, internet access, and other costs of doing business.
That would bankrupt over 95% of the websites on the net. They mop their own floors, pay $20/month for hosting, buy off-brand laser cartridges, don't gaze down at the world from the 22nd floor.
The GDPR gives significant leniency for "inadvertent" violations of their policies for companies you wouldn't normally expect to even understand the laws (such as small online stores).
[Citation needed] Sorely needed.
If you are small enough that a hundred thousand in legal fees is unreasonable, and your business model is not built around the sale and distribution of customer data, you don't have to worry about the GDPR much.
What specifically does "much" entail? And are you volunteering to pay the $20M Euro fine? Frankly, I'd have to be a very sloppy businessman to skip proper legal advice for such a large liability, if just to to get a proper idea of what "much" means.
You completely misread my remark. It's about people -- not banks -- and US law certainly isn't what's at issue here.
I was remarking that the poster was blithely saying that he'd prefer to not do business with certain companies and that the poster's ok with a law that rams the poster's choice down the throats of neighbors, family, countrymen...
As a workaround, we exaggerate the spacing between monospaced (e.g. Courier) sentences by double-spacing to make it easier to spot sentence breaks. Old-school typewriters spaced characters like "i" the same as "W", leading to a lot of blank space between letters of the same word. The eye of and decent reader "fixates" and recognizes entire words, phrases or sentences, but the inter-letter space within words makes words harder to automatically pick out. This is why proportionally-set text is easier to read.
The main body copy of books & magazines are typeset in proportional fonts. Duh. These fonts have been carefully designed and tweaked over hundreds (yes, hundreds) of years by people who thought and cared deeply about readability. Also good looks, but readability was key. They did many tests and experiments to maximize ease and speed of reading. THE WIDTH OF THE BLANK IS PART OF THE DESIGN. If the designer wanted wider spaces, s/he would put them there.
And I'm better at reading my own handwriting than other people's. Anybody surprised?
This study is touting a statistically insignificant (3% difference measured on roughly half of a 60-person group) "result" that says people perform better on what they're used to.
Big corporations will deal with the law and end up liking it because it keeps out the riffraff. They can easily afford the consultants, lawyers, etc. Smaller would-be players, not so much.
This has been the way of Europe for a long time: a long list of (originally) well-intentioned, "reasonable" laws, regulations, taxes, requirements, etc. (not to mention bribes, shakedowns) that conspire by their sheer mass to raise the barrier to starting and operating a small business.
This bears the seeds of Gibson's dystopian vision of never-ending corporate cyber-warfare. Hard to see how companies could resist using this as a pretext for gaining commercial advantage.
This isn't just about Uber, etc. This pretty much puts a bullet in contract engineering/programming in CA. Creating soft/hardware is part of a tech company's regular business, so this judgement says that anybody who participates in that would automatically be an employee even if it's a brief or specialized gig.
This just makes 3rd parties richer, namely the gov't and the "consulting companies" that more & more companies are using as intermediaries. "Consulting companies" is in quotes because there are companies in CA that merely act as condoms to provide temp workers without the obligations of hiring real employees. They're not really even like temp agencies since a tech company will typically find the consultant themselves, but then the consultant has to be hired as am employee of the intermediary. There's zero chance that said intermediary will find you another gig.
Under this arrangement the "employee" loses many tax deductions and advantages, so you end up with the worst of being an employee and a gig worker
Officially the intermediary "hires" you for a gig but it's not a real job since they fully intend to lay you off once the gig's up. (Normally it would be much harder for a employer to lay off regular employees without trying to find them another spot in the organization and/or give them separation payments, but a consulting firm's mission is to serve their customer so the can legitimately say that you're redundant when the customer no longer needs you.)
This doesn't make the ex-contractor richer since they pay the "employee" their consulting rates MINUS all the money they have to give the gov't. This includes contributions for unemployment insurance even though your chances of collecting are zero. And of course the intermediary marks up the total when they bill back their customer. Both the contractor and customer lose. Makes hiring US temp engineers that much less attractive.
The other trick they've implemented is that replacement "parts" are available... as entire expensive subassemblies. Any Right to Repair laws will have to prohibit unreasonable pricing of parts, but their trick is that you can't accuse them of gouging if the subassembly is not unreasonably priced for what it is.
Clutch on my washer burned out. Though easily removed, part is not available separately but no problem: there's an entire new transmission unit which includes clutch. It's $150 if you shop carefully on eBay, $250-300 full price from a factory-authorized tech. $150 for a clutch would be unreasonable, but $150 for an entire transmission is not.
Embedded circuit boards seem to be the ultimate excuse to sell entire insanely-expensive assemblies. 'Coz you can't expect anyone to component-level repair those, can you? And of course custom chips seal the deal since they're never sold.
It's like the situation with US-made cars in the 1970's & 80's: pure junk dressed up in ever-increasing glitter & features.
I can only hope for an analogous market correction: the Japanese came into the market with the "naive" idea that quality would sell cars. Fast forward a number of years and I see that Ford are essentially throwing in the towel in the passenger-car market.
#1 And exactly how to "better... take care" of a washer, dryer, fridge, etc. aside from plugging them in and keeping 'em clean? Maybe play Mozart for them? Massages? Subliminal pep talks? Playdates with Alexa?
#2 "Better" stuff? Top-rated Maytag fridge failed within warranty. I commented to the factory tech (an older guy) that maybe I should have bought an expensive Subzero or Viking. He just laughed! Said in his experience those are the most failure-prone of the lot, that they tend to require the most extensive (and expensive) repairs.
#3 Glad your washer only needed $70-worth of parts, but others' mileage may vary, e.g. my 1.5-year-old washer recently needed $175 in carefully price-shopped parts + 3 hours labor. Now, 6 months later, a new & unrelated problem: the water inlet valve is leaking. If I were forced to use factory-authorized service and pay their full-retail-price parts, those 2 repair visits would cost significantly more than a (probably crappy) new washer -- all within the first 2 years of service.
It's also my experience that most non-durable consumer devices like phones, TV's and laptops last long enough that by the time they break I want to replace them
Most new-car buyers trade them in for something new after 3 years, but would you buy a car with zero resale value after 3 years? Maybe you can afford to trash older stuff, but many people sell them for, like, money. Obviously, making repairs cost-prohibitive kills that secondary market.
It's also my experience that most "durable goods" (Like kitchen appliances and such that go 10+ years) usually last long enough to be worthless before they break.
Speak for yourself. All the "durable" appliances I've bought in the last 10 years have needed out-of-warrantee service before 10 years. Well before.
As a driver, you don't get to run over a child in a school zone with the defense, "Your honor, I drive through here every day. I've NOT killed a child 300,000 times. Please weigh all that good against this one tiny death."
Actually, I've seen that defense work: waiting for my turn in traffic court, an old man was charged with going through a stop sign on an obscure suburban corner. A cop had been posted there after a kid got hit.
"20 years I've been going through that stop sign, and never before do the police stop me." His exact words, seared into my memory.
The judge let him off with a not-so-stern warning, despite the guy having just admitted to thousands of offenses, that he was chronic part of the problem that got the kid hit.
The law needs to be adjusted to accept the reality that nothing is perfect
The problem (traffic, roads, laws, standards) will get redefined to fit the new AI solution, same as when we transitioned from horses to cars. When you get enough autocars out there, the roads will begin to get engineered to mitigate the weaknesses of AIs, bit by bit.. This is exactly what happened to cars: we created and adapted roads, laws, enforcement, etc to match car's needs and continue to do so. The Model T was high off the ground to deal with the rutted, muddy dirt roads (or no roads at all) they were likely to encounter. Today, we have aerodynamic skirts a few inches off the pavement for efficiency. Pavement--smooth pavement--is simply assumed.
That's what always happens with any disruptive technology: we end up adapting everything, including ourselves, to meet it part way.
An example of things that will probably be changed soon than later: road construction zones will be required to implement certain protocols (signage, markers, notifying some central database, whatever) to make them easier for AIs to traverse. Failure to do so will entail liability for accidents.
My guess is that true full autonomy will first roll out in a big way on certain long-haul trucking routes. Many freeways are a fairly clean, well-defined situation and the prize for trucking companies is too big to ignore. Those parts of the chosen freeways that are problematic for the AIs will be upgraded, either due to lobbying by large trucking firms, and/or those firms'll kick in some of their own $ to make those changes happen sooner.
The human accident rate is actually around one per 200K miles. See my other post.
BUT that human rate is for _actual_ accidents -- not near misses. I'd guesstimate that near misses vs. accident is better than 10:1. Let's call it 1 near miss per 20K miles. Meaning a "phew!" moment every year or two for the average driver, which feels about right.
As far as real-world consequences, it'd be much more realistic to chalk up each intervention as a near miss. By that count, 5K miles/intervention is only 4x worse than humans.
Room/need for improvement? Yes!!! But not decades of development.
Slashdot Mirror
A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
Even something day-to-day like a simple "AI" that tweaks grocery-store prices harms some people to some degree when it raises prices.
People and current "AIs" violate the first law all the time, or they'd be paralyzed into inaction. Most decisions of any importance end up hurting somebody in some way.
The 3 laws are a simplification -- a dangerous gross oversimplification. They're just something an author dreams up with his author buddies during a night of drinking, not something that just needs tweaking to make it work.
Occam warns us to make things as simple as possible, but his very next few words warn against oversimplification.
The scooter drivers have a right to be on the road.
They're on the sidewalk.
This is really a problem with LA traffic law & culture since it's legal to ride bicycles, skateboards and other "exclusively human-powered" vehicles on the sidewalk. This has led to the public perception that anything goes on the sidewalks.
Technically, scooters are powered and thus aren't allowed on the sidewalk, but LA cops aren't keen to wade into this so they just ignore the entire issue -- like they pretty much ignore anything that happens off the roadway. Scooters, electric-assist bicycles, etc rule the sidewalks.
Quite a few [hundreds of $thousands]. We also have to pay for janitorial services, internet access, and other costs of doing business.
That would bankrupt over 95% of the websites on the net. They mop their own floors, pay $20/month for hosting, buy off-brand laser cartridges, don't gaze down at the world from the 22nd floor.
The GDPR gives significant leniency for "inadvertent" violations of their policies for companies you wouldn't normally expect to even understand the laws (such as small online stores).
[Citation needed] Sorely needed.
If you are small enough that a hundred thousand in legal fees is unreasonable, and your business model is not built around the sale and distribution of customer data, you don't have to worry about the GDPR much.
What specifically does "much" entail? And are you volunteering to pay the $20M Euro fine? Frankly, I'd have to be a very sloppy businessman to skip proper legal advice for such a large liability, if just to to get a proper idea of what "much" means.
You completely misread my remark. It's about people -- not banks -- and US law certainly isn't what's at issue here.
I was remarking that the poster was blithely saying that he'd prefer to not do business with certain companies and that the poster's ok with a law that rams the poster's choice down the throats of neighbors, family, countrymen...
WTF!? Is that just Skidmore College, or what?
As a workaround, we exaggerate the spacing between monospaced (e.g. Courier) sentences by double-spacing to make it easier to spot sentence breaks. Old-school typewriters spaced characters like "i" the same as "W", leading to a lot of blank space between letters of the same word. The eye of and decent reader "fixates" and recognizes entire words, phrases or sentences, but the inter-letter space within words makes words harder to automatically pick out. This is why proportionally-set text is easier to read.
The main body copy of books & magazines are typeset in proportional fonts. Duh. These fonts have been carefully designed and tweaked over hundreds (yes, hundreds) of years by people who thought and cared deeply about readability. Also good looks, but readability was key. They did many tests and experiments to maximize ease and speed of reading. THE WIDTH OF THE BLANK IS PART OF THE DESIGN. If the designer wanted wider spaces, s/he would put them there.
And I'm better at reading my own handwriting than other people's. Anybody surprised?
This study is touting a statistically insignificant (3% difference measured on roughly half of a 60-person group) "result" that says people perform better on what they're used to.
In college, that deserves an F.
GDPR is based on location, not citizenship. https://cybercounsel.co.uk/data-subjects/
Big corporations will deal with the law and end up liking it because it keeps out the riffraff. They can easily afford the consultants, lawyers, etc. Smaller would-be players, not so much.
This has been the way of Europe for a long time: a long list of (originally) well-intentioned, "reasonable" laws, regulations, taxes, requirements, etc. (not to mention bribes, shakedowns) that conspire by their sheer mass to raise the barrier to starting and operating a small business.
Nope. GDPR is based on location, not citizenship. https://cybercounsel.co.uk/data-subjects/
As a EU resident... I'd rather not do business with those companies.
And you'd rather impose that "choice" on hundreds of millions of your neighbors too, since GDPR can't be waived.
I manage the CRM of a US financial institution with EU clients and there is guidance
So, how many $hundreds of thousands did some legal team charge your employer that guidance, not to mention ongoing guidance and review?
This bears the seeds of Gibson's dystopian vision of never-ending corporate cyber-warfare. Hard to see how companies could resist using this as a pretext for gaining commercial advantage.
Basically it is saying ...
No, you can't do that with the law!
Instead, try for "the maximum that a creative lawyer could stretch this to mean..." and then double it.
This isn't just about Uber, etc. This pretty much puts a bullet in contract engineering/programming in CA. Creating soft/hardware is part of a tech company's regular business, so this judgement says that anybody who participates in that would automatically be an employee even if it's a brief or specialized gig.
This just makes 3rd parties richer, namely the gov't and the "consulting companies" that more & more companies are using as intermediaries. "Consulting companies" is in quotes because there are companies in CA that merely act as condoms to provide temp workers without the obligations of hiring real employees. They're not really even like temp agencies since a tech company will typically find the consultant themselves, but then the consultant has to be hired as am employee of the intermediary. There's zero chance that said intermediary will find you another gig.
Under this arrangement the "employee" loses many tax deductions and advantages, so you end up with the worst of being an employee and a gig worker
Officially the intermediary "hires" you for a gig but it's not a real job since they fully intend to lay you off once the gig's up. (Normally it would be much harder for a employer to lay off regular employees without trying to find them another spot in the organization and/or give them separation payments, but a consulting firm's mission is to serve their customer so the can legitimately say that you're redundant when the customer no longer needs you.)
This doesn't make the ex-contractor richer since they pay the "employee" their consulting rates MINUS all the money they have to give the gov't. This includes contributions for unemployment insurance even though your chances of collecting are zero. And of course the intermediary marks up the total when they bill back their customer. Both the contractor and customer lose. Makes hiring US temp engineers that much less attractive.
you were able to source the replacement parts
The other trick they've implemented is that replacement "parts" are available... as entire expensive subassemblies. Any Right to Repair laws will have to prohibit unreasonable pricing of parts, but their trick is that you can't accuse them of gouging if the subassembly is not unreasonably priced for what it is.
Clutch on my washer burned out. Though easily removed, part is not available separately but no problem: there's an entire new transmission unit which includes clutch. It's $150 if you shop carefully on eBay, $250-300 full price from a factory-authorized tech. $150 for a clutch would be unreasonable, but $150 for an entire transmission is not.
Embedded circuit boards seem to be the ultimate excuse to sell entire insanely-expensive assemblies. 'Coz you can't expect anyone to component-level repair those, can you? And of course custom chips seal the deal since they're never sold.
unintended consequences
Unintended... are you sure about that? The mark of a good lobbyist is that they leave no fingerprints.
truly a lot of junk out there and worse
It's like the situation with US-made cars in the 1970's & 80's: pure junk dressed up in ever-increasing glitter & features.
I can only hope for an analogous market correction: the Japanese came into the market with the "naive" idea that quality would sell cars. Fast forward a number of years and I see that Ford are essentially throwing in the towel in the passenger-car market.
Buy better stuff and take care of it maybe.
#1 And exactly how to "better... take care" of a washer, dryer, fridge, etc. aside from plugging them in and keeping 'em clean? Maybe play Mozart for them? Massages? Subliminal pep talks? Playdates with Alexa?
#2 "Better" stuff? Top-rated Maytag fridge failed within warranty. I commented to the factory tech (an older guy) that maybe I should have bought an expensive Subzero or Viking. He just laughed! Said in his experience those are the most failure-prone of the lot, that they tend to require the most extensive (and expensive) repairs.
#3 Glad your washer only needed $70-worth of parts, but others' mileage may vary, e.g. my 1.5-year-old washer recently needed $175 in carefully price-shopped parts + 3 hours labor. Now, 6 months later, a new & unrelated problem: the water inlet valve is leaking. If I were forced to use factory-authorized service and pay their full-retail-price parts, those 2 repair visits would cost significantly more than a (probably crappy) new washer -- all within the first 2 years of service.
It's also my experience that most non-durable consumer devices like phones, TV's and laptops last long enough that by the time they break I want to replace them
Most new-car buyers trade them in for something new after 3 years, but would you buy a car with zero resale value after 3 years? Maybe you can afford to trash older stuff, but many people sell them for, like, money. Obviously, making repairs cost-prohibitive kills that secondary market.
It's also my experience that most "durable goods" (Like kitchen appliances and such that go 10+ years) usually last long enough to be worthless before they break.
Speak for yourself. All the "durable" appliances I've bought in the last 10 years have needed out-of-warrantee service before 10 years. Well before.
As a driver, you don't get to run over a child in a school zone with the defense, "Your honor, I drive through here every day. I've NOT killed a child 300,000 times. Please weigh all that good against this one tiny death."
Actually, I've seen that defense work: waiting for my turn in traffic court, an old man was charged with going through a stop sign on an obscure suburban corner. A cop had been posted there after a kid got hit.
"20 years I've been going through that stop sign, and never before do the police stop me." His exact words, seared into my memory.
The judge let him off with a not-so-stern warning, despite the guy having just admitted to thousands of offenses, that he was chronic part of the problem that got the kid hit.
The law needs to be adjusted to accept the reality that nothing is perfect
The problem (traffic, roads, laws, standards) will get redefined to fit the new AI solution, same as when we transitioned from horses to cars. When you get enough autocars out there, the roads will begin to get engineered to mitigate the weaknesses of AIs, bit by bit.. This is exactly what happened to cars: we created and adapted roads, laws, enforcement, etc to match car's needs and continue to do so. The Model T was high off the ground to deal with the rutted, muddy dirt roads (or no roads at all) they were likely to encounter. Today, we have aerodynamic skirts a few inches off the pavement for efficiency. Pavement--smooth pavement--is simply assumed.
That's what always happens with any disruptive technology: we end up adapting everything, including ourselves, to meet it part way.
An example of things that will probably be changed soon than later: road construction zones will be required to implement certain protocols (signage, markers, notifying some central database, whatever) to make them easier for AIs to traverse. Failure to do so will entail liability for accidents.
My guess is that true full autonomy will first roll out in a big way on certain long-haul trucking routes. Many freeways are a fairly clean, well-defined situation and the prize for trucking companies is too big to ignore. Those parts of the chosen freeways that are problematic for the AIs will be upgraded, either due to lobbying by large trucking firms, and/or those firms'll kick in some of their own $ to make those changes happen sooner.
"The driver had received several visual and one audible hands-on warning..."
Bah... just Tesla's lawyers being weenies again. Ignore!
Fanboys: "But can't you see!? Elon's tech will save the day. I want to see the show when I push it."
Really guys, enough with the silly YouTubes of you abusing your AutoPilots just to prove some kind of point.
The human accident rate is actually around one per 200K miles. See my other post.
BUT that human rate is for _actual_ accidents -- not near misses. I'd guesstimate that near misses vs. accident is better than 10:1. Let's call it 1 near miss per 20K miles. Meaning a "phew!" moment every year or two for the average driver, which feels about right.
As far as real-world consequences, it'd be much more realistic to chalk up each intervention as a near miss. By that count, 5K miles/intervention is only 4x worse than humans.
Room/need for improvement? Yes!!! But not decades of development.