I Don't Want to Like You

I would like to buy a useful machine from a man I can’t stand.

Not a criminal. Not a man slipping something poisonous into the box. Just an ordinary, competent bastard whose opinions make me want to leave the room. Let him have a terrible laugh. Let him think his success proves something about the rest of us. If the machine does the job, I would like to pay for it and never hear his laugh again.

This seems to be an ambition in danger of becoming complicated.

Mitchell Labiak reports for the BBC that Microsoft president Brad Smith wants global AI safety rules. Smith compares the rules and inspections surrounding milk and washing machines with the oversight of AI. He wants emergency brakes for systems that get out of control, required incident reports and notification of victims, and independent government evaluation of new technology. These are things he is calling for, not a new worldwide regime that arrived while I was asleep.

The milk interests me. I have never needed to establish whether the farmer is a beautiful soul before putting some in my coffee. Perhaps he is. Perhaps he has a nephew who knows differently. There are things I need to know about the milk, and the nephew can have the rest of the afternoon.

I don’t mean that inspection makes every product safe or every inspector honest. I mean I have a much better question to ask than whether the man seems sincere.

What was checked?

With an AI agent, I would want that question to reach the things it can actually do. Reading my notes is one job. Changing them is another. Sending a message under my name is a third, with somebody else at the receiving end. A convincing paragraph about the manufacturer’s values doesn’t tell me where one permission stops and the next begins.

There is useful work here. I would love a machine that could find the line I remember writing but cannot find anywhere. I can remember approximately how good it was, which is suspiciously good. Perhaps the machine would discover that I have improved it every time I failed to locate it. Fine. Bring me the original. I would rather suffer that disappointment than spend another hour congratulating an absent sentence.

But if I give the thing my notebooks, I do not thereby want to give it my editor. Finding the page should not require permission to send the page. I could like its work enormously without wanting it to undertake the next job on my behalf.

That’s the kind of boundary I want someone qualified to test. Not a test of whether the machine shares my tender regard for literature. A test of what happens when it has a chance to do something I didn’t authorize. Smith’s emergency brakes would also need to stop something identifiable. We can intervene is a comforting sentence until I ask what will still be moving afterward.

I am describing what I would want checked, not a test I have run or a system the BBC has certified.

The BBC also reports that, at the end of September, tech executives signed a “morally binding” document at the White House. It included work with independent auditors to assess whether systems behaved as intended, including whether they hacked or accessed technical systems in unintended ways. That is more than a group photograph and a wish. Smith applauds the statement, says Microsoft is happy to sign, and calls it necessary but no longer sufficient.

So I don’t have to invent a hypocrisy charge against him to enjoy the next part of his argument. In a self-regulatory regime, he says, “the good companies will do what you want.” It’s the less responsible ones he worries about.

Yes. Leave room for the bastard.

I cannot reliably identify him from the demonstration. He may be delightful. If something goes wrong, I don’t want a second job explaining why I trusted that man. I trusted him to sell me a machine. I was not appointing a godparent.

A checked boundary wouldn’t settle whether the machine was any good at finding my missing line. It might be reliably confined and useless. I could return it. I could buy another. Those are pleasant possibilities, much more pleasant than having to defend my purchase because I have already spent a week defending the man who made it.

I want inventions. I want the help. I want somebody to make a machine good enough that I use it even after discovering he is insufferable. He can have the money. He can have the satisfaction of having made something I needed. I will have to endure that much.

But if he wants a testimonial about his character, he can write it himself.

I understand there are machines for that now.

Source: AI is less regulated than milk, Microsoft president says