It’s not just extreme cases like saving children without authorization—have you ever heard someone (possibly a parent) saying that constant supervision is more work than doing the task themselves?
I was going to say that if you can’t trust subordinates, you might as well not have them, but that’s an exaggeration—tools can be very useful. It’s fine that a crane doesn’t have the capacity for independent action, it’s still very useful for lifting heavy objects. [1]
In some ways, you get more safety by doing IA (intelligence augmentation), but while people are probably Friendly (unlikely to destroy the human race), they’re not reliably friendly.
[1] For all I know, these days the taller cranes have an active ability to rebalance themselves. If so, that’s still very limited unsupervised action.
It’s not just extreme cases like saving children without authorization—have you ever heard someone (possibly a parent) saying that constant supervision is more work than doing the task themselves?
That’s only true if you (the supervisor) know how to perform the task yourself. However, there are a great many tasks that we don’t know how to do, but could evaluate the result if the AI did them for us. We could ask it to prove P!=NP, to write provably correct programs, to design machines and materials and medications that we could test in the normal way that we test such things, etc.
It’s not just extreme cases like saving children without authorization—have you ever heard someone (possibly a parent) saying that constant supervision is more work than doing the task themselves?
I was going to say that if you can’t trust subordinates, you might as well not have them, but that’s an exaggeration—tools can be very useful. It’s fine that a crane doesn’t have the capacity for independent action, it’s still very useful for lifting heavy objects. [1]
In some ways, you get more safety by doing IA (intelligence augmentation), but while people are probably Friendly (unlikely to destroy the human race), they’re not reliably friendly.
[1] For all I know, these days the taller cranes have an active ability to rebalance themselves. If so, that’s still very limited unsupervised action.
That’s only true if you (the supervisor) know how to perform the task yourself. However, there are a great many tasks that we don’t know how to do, but could evaluate the result if the AI did them for us. We could ask it to prove P!=NP, to write provably correct programs, to design machines and materials and medications that we could test in the normal way that we test such things, etc.