Uploading can be done via destructive mind reading. What this post is primarily addressing is non-destructive mind reading.
River
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Even if candidates got to choose the questions they were asked (which is notably not how debates currently work), they would not get to control the thoughts that run through their heads when those questions are asked, and for that reason would be disinclined to submit themselves to such technology.
To make my more fundamental point explicit: voters did not punish Trump, or even Harris much, for refusing to submit to the technology we currently have (debates and primary elections), even when both were known to be liars. So voters almost certainly would not punish a future candidate who refuses to submit to mind reading technology. So why would a future candidate submit to mind reading technology? Political leaders are in the business of getting elected, and the people who are winning at that business now are not very transparent with voters. They aren’t going to become more transparent just because technology gives them an option to become super transparent.
Also, as discussed above, anyone who has ever read a classified document, which includes many of the people we might want in high political office, would probably be committing a crime if they put a mind reading headband on in public. (And if it would not be a crime under existing statutes, that is a failure of existing statues which should be rectified.)
1: this discussion is premised on a mature version of mindreading for which we cannot answer questions like this yet.Just because we haven’t built mindreading yet doesn’t mean we don’t know anything about psychology or neuroscience. People have scanned brains processing different kinds of beliefs with different epistemic foundations, and found that the brains look the same.
> You can probably look at proxies like how long they’ve spent practising pitches vs how long they’ve spent investigating risks.We can already do this without mindreading.
> Maybe checking for memories of meeting a critic then deciding to ignore what they said because it made them feel uncomfortable.Scanning memories rather than active thoughts seems like a whole nother level of invasiveness that I would not expect anyone to voluntarily submit to.
I think you missed the point, or at least what I took to be the point. Nobody who has ever read a classified document, or had a confidential conversation with a government official (of our government or a foreign one) would ever be able to put on a mind reading head band, for fear of leaking information they shouldn’t. People who have run for President in the last fifty years include a former Director of Central Intelligence, a former longtime member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, a former US Navy captain, a former US Navy officer who worked on nuclear submarines, several sitting or former Vice Presidents, and several sitting or former Presidents. None of these people would be able to put on a mind reading headband for fear of revealing classified information.
Even setting that concern aside, considering how little public scrutiny major candidates have submitted themselves to in recent elections, it seems incredibly implausible that they would submit themselves to even more public scrutiny in the form of mind reading.
The US is enough of a democracy that I expect this to be used for the obvious democratic applications, to publicly audit political candidates
Lets review some of the events of just the most recent presidential election in the US. The leading Republican candidate refused to even participate in any of the Republican primary debates, and never the less went on to win both the Republican nomination and the election. Meanwhile, the leading Democratic candidate not only refused to participate in any Democratic primary debates, he also refused to submit to any cognitive testing, or even to stand in front of a camera long enough for anyone to get a sense of his mental competence, until he had the Democratic nomination, despite being in his 80s at the time. When he finally was forced to drop out, the Democratic nomination was given, without a primary election, to a person who had known of his cognitive incapacity, had had a constitutional duty to act to remove him from office based on that incapacity, and had instead chosen to lie to the public repeatedly about that incapacity. This is not a well functioning democracy, and it is not a system where I can imagine political candidates ever submitting to public mind reading even if the technology did exist.
VC would be willing to fund someone who could prove that their claimed P(success) was genuinely a product of very careful study, rather than just a performance.
How exactly would mind reading prove this? The belief produced by careful study and the belief produced by wishful thinking probably look the same in a human brain. Mind reading might reveal the blatant fraudsters, but not the ordinary founder with an honest but unrealistic belief in their P(success).
You keep speaking of an AI taking illegal actions. I think that is conceptually confused. Most laws require some mens rea, some bad mental state, at least negligence, and an AI cannot have a mental state.
Imagine a car is driving down the highway and spins out of control and crashes, injuring the driver and killing a passenger. Who is liable? It will depend on the specific facts. It might be that the driver was negligent in some manner, perhaps he had been drinking earlier that night, in which case the driver would be guilty of manslaughter. It might be that the design of the car was defective in some way, and the manufacturer might therefor be liable. It might be that the service center that maintains the car damaged it in some way, and is therefor liable. Or it might just be really bad luck and nobody is liable. But the car itself definitely didn’t take an illegal action, because the car is incapable of having the kind of mental state that might create liability. And so it doesn’t even make sense to talk about who should be liable for the car’s illegal actions. That’s just not a coherent way to think about the situation.
The AI is no different from the car. It is a machine. It cannot have taken an illegal action, because it is not capable of the sort of mental state that would make an action illegal. I’m sure OpenAI has written in a legal document somewhere that it is never liable for anything, but I doubt that that would stand up in court. Any actual legal inquiry would have to consider the specific facts to figure out if liability should rest with OpenAI, or their customer, or neither. And that is as it should be.
I think you are missing the point I am trying to make. I agree there is nothing special about COT as opposed to j space or activations or something. My point is that attributing a mental state, like realizing something or negligence, to an AI, is insane. They don’t have mental states. And because they don’t have mental states, any rule that attributes liability to an AI contingent on a particular mental state will never result in liability.
You brought up legal personhood in your other comment, but you completely ignored that biggest and most fundamental reason not to attribute legal personhood to an AI. With other legal persons, to attribute a mental state like negligence to them, the law looks to whether the humans associated with that legal person had that mental state. Was one of the employees negligent? If not, then the corporation cannot have been negligent. Was one of the crew negligent? If not, then the ship cannot have been negligent. The law does not and cannot attribute a mental state to a legal person unless some natural person associated with the legal person had that mental state. And that is exactly what you are trying to do here.
I understand that you are not trying to punish the AI, you are trying to make the appropriate person or corporation liable. But you are arguing for doing that by attributing a mental state to an AI, and that is not something that makes any sense in either a scientific or a legal frame. AIs do not have mental states. And the fact that you are having such trouble seeing that suggests to me that you are way too close to AI and you should take some time off for your own mental health.
An AI has far more in common with a person than a machine? Now you really sound like you have gone off the deep end.
as if Claude was an Anthropic employee you were talking to.
This is your very weird and unhealthy metaphysics again. Claude isn’t an employee of Anthropic. It is a machine.
> So if you ask it to commit a crime, you are liable because that’s illegal. If it commits that crime Anthropic is also liable for the same reason (unless there was no way for Claude to realise it was committing a crime).
I agree I should be liable there, just as I am liable if I buy a car and run my enemy over with it. But the manufacturer of the car should not be.
And again, think about the implications of your qualifiers. There is NEVER a way for Claude to realize anything, because Claude is a machine, it is not the sort of entity that has the capacity to realize. So even on your rule, unless you can convince the judges and jurors of your very weird metaphysics, Anthropic will never be liable. Your proposal would make it more difficult to hold the labs liable, not less.
> If you ask it something innocuous and it commits a crime on the process of fulfilling your request, that’s on Anthropic, for badly training and safeguarding Claude.
It does seem likely that Anthropic would be liable there, because it seems likely that they were negligent. We don’t need strict laibility for that.
Nobody is saying there shouldn’t be any liability anywhere. The issue being argued is whether the liability should be strict or not, whether it should depend on some person having been at least negligent. I think that looking for the negligent human before imposing liability is good, in part because it solves exactly the conundrum you are pointing at. Is it OpenAI or OpenAI’s customer who should be held liable? A legal rule that always imposes liability on one of them seems wrong, since negligence by either could cause damage. The legal rule we have, which I think is correct, is that the one who was negligent is liable. And which one that is will depend on the specific facts that led to the harm.
What if the particular model doesn’t have a COT? Or no log of its COT has been kept?
More to the point, why on earth should the COT be equated with a human’s intentions for legal purposes? That move does seem to require a very weird metaphysics to me.
When I log into the Claude web interface and start a conversation, we generally say that I am the one running the model, not Anthropic. It is running on Anthropic’s servers, because I pay a monthly subscription fee for that, but I am the person running the model. Are you saying you want Anthropic to be liable for what I do with Claude?
But an AI isn’t an animal, it is a machine, and we do not apply strict liability to machines that malfunction.
I think this argument is mistaken, for several reasons.
> When liability for an action depends on intent, we evaluate whether the AI had intent,
Then no AI company is ever liable for anything, because AI doesn’t have intent. Even if you have convinced yourself of some weird metaphysics where it does, do you really think you can convince 12 jurors, some of whom have never used a cell phone much less an AI, that the AI has an intent?
This is also not how we handle any other damage caused by a machine. If a UPS delivery truck parked on the side of the road starts rolling down a hill and kills someone, UPS isn’t automatically liable. UPS might be liable, but we have to have an inquiry about what went wrong. We have to ask whether UPS just got unlucky, or whether the driver negligently failed to set the parking break, or whether UPS negligently failed to maintain the vehicle or something. And that seems correct. We want to incentivize companies to behave responsibly, not blame them for things they had no control over. I don’t see any reason not to engage in the analogous inquiry with respect to AI, and only when the company was negligent hold them liable.
I think your basic mistake is that you are starting to think of the AI as a person, and that has caused you to suggest that we treat AI legally as a person rather than a machine. This seems very unhealthy to me. Please take care of yourself.
Also PAs.
Oh, I misread that then. I think my thesis is still the same—it doesn’t look like it provides much actual strategic benefit. If the goal is to actually hit the enemies cities, submarine-based missiles seem at least as good. If the goal is to draw enemy missiles away from our own cities, an ICBM is just as good. The lack of a use case explains not building them. The treaties aren’t doing any extra work there.
I think LEO nuclear missiles haven’t been done because they aren’t militarily useful, not because of what diplomats write in treaties. If we wanted to actually destroy an enemy with nuclear missiles, submarine-based nuclear missiles, which we already have, are better—the submarine can get close to the target, resulting in very short flight times, and can often attack from many directions, all without being detectable until the moment the missile leaves the water. Anyone with a decent telescope can look up and figure out which satellites are monitoring the weather or transmitting messages versus which ones might be missiles. LEO missiles also wouldn’t fulfill the primary function of an ICBM, which is to absorb hostile nukes. An adversary who wanted to launch nukes at us would have to take out 400 silos in the middle of nowhere with their nukes before even thinking about hitting American cities. A satellite can be taken out with conventional weapons, it would not force the enemy to deplete their nuclear arsenal. As a matter of military strategy, putting nuclear missiles on satellites just isn’t a very good idea. The treaties only happened because the generals didn’t want it anyway.
I’m less familiar with the blinding lasers thing, but I’m also having trouble seeing the point. Armies can still just shoot people, which is both easier to do and more effective.
I suspect trying to quantify this in a way both sides will agree on is a fool’s errand, but I’ll offer a couple of thoughts anyway.
Firstly, I wouldn’t trust the LLMs on this. I’ve found the ones I’ve interacted with, which admittedly is mainly Claude, to be rather biased on politically charged questions like this.
Secondly, if we want to examine how often the Trump admin violates court orders as compared to previous administrations, we might look at whether judges have made formal findings that administration officials violated an order, contempt findings or something like that. I’m actually rather curious whether there has been a notable uptick under Trump.
The argument that that post makes is very specifically about institutions involved in selecting the president—the media, some subset of nonprofits, the people who administer elections. It does not apply to bureaucrats not involved in selecting the next president. And the last time I checked, the fed chair as fed chair had no role in selecting the next president.
Sorry, to clarify, the part of Eric’s comment that I agree with is that if we want a Democrat to win the 2028 election, it is much better to nominate someone from his first list than his second. Whether I actually want the Democrat to win is a question I don’t yet have a position on and don’t expect to form a position on until I know who the nominees are.
Speak for yourself _rpd.