- cross-posted to:
- news@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- news@lemmy.world
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/52426446
US Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson said on Friday he would resist describing AI agents as autonomous actors that “break loose” with “wills and desires of their own,” suggesting the developers who instruct agents would be the ones liable for harm.
“I’m going to continue as long as I am chairman to resist this anthropomorphizing of these tools,” Ferguson said at the Reuters Momentum AI Austin event. “If someone tells a tool to do something, and the tool does it, I don’t think we would say, ‘Oh, what do we do about the tool?’”
Ferguson’s remarks illustrated potential avenues for the Trump administration to take as incidents rise in which agentic AI testing resulted in unauthorized access to corporate or government data.
It’s important to hold people accountable, but it’s also important to consider regulation that might be needed specifically for AI. I’m concerned this might be similar to the “guns don’t kill people” framing that’s used to resist gun control.
Plus, this is more attention on those hacking test exercises that led to AIs doing hacking. That’s a distraction from the real causes of concern around AI: environmental impact, job loss, fraud
Guns don’t kill people is a ridiculous argument that no one believes, but people who like guns fall back on as a last refuge, and it is good enough to dig your heals in, so they can keep their toys. Also the 2nd amendment is the real reason gun control is hard, not arguments.
The difference is there are a lot more gun owners than AI supporters, so unbelievable arguments don’t really work when you don’t have a population primed to ignore the obvious fallacies.