"A series of tubes" was the same kind of political character assassination that led to Howard Dean getting ridiculed for his infamous scream. He butchered the sentence. Fair. But Stevens should be ridiculed for parroting a tech industry lobby stance about net neutrality, not for the series of tubes metaphor.
You are probably too young to remember that the dominant metaphor for the internet in 1990s politics was "the information superhighway." It was easy to think of the web as "driving" browsers to visit web "sites", with slow bandwidth being analogous to being caught in traffic. But the internet is closer to water, gas, and electricity than roads. Concepts like bandwidth and throughput are closer to how they play out in infrastructure policy for various things with tubes, versus cars and roads. Do you think he's wrong and that the internet is closer to "a big truck" versus "a series of tubes"?
The issue being debated was net neutrality and bandwidth, including specifics about who pays for what and the downstream second-order consequences of various policies. He was parroting some line from some telecom lobbyist, but the point the lobbyist was trying to make through Stevens was about how if certain policies about who pays for bandwidth were adopted, it could disincentivize some things at the Tier 1/2 layer that could increase transport costs at the Tier 2/3 layer that impacts ordinary people's bandwidth.
If I build a robot that murders my neighbor, I’m still at fault.
We don’t absolve drivers of responsibility because of cruise control.
In that sense, AI is nothing new. If it is abused to cause harm, the person behind it should be liable.
What if a person physically broke into the car and did the same thing? Clearly they are the one to blame then.
The whole person in the loop is liable is already an outdated concept when decisions are made beyond the persons physical control.
If GM does something (or fails to do something) to their vehicle that causes me to crash, they're liable for the crash.
If someone cuts my brake lines (alters my vehicle) and I crash my car and kill someone, the person that cut the lines is responsible. I have to prove the context of course, and or an investigator has to do so.
And the responsible entity may refuse to pay up, may refuse to take responsibility. None of that is new either.
Let's say that OpenAI used a shell company that hosts server where an agent spun up another agent on instructions from another agent which was corrupted by bit errors from the inference framework which caused some major hack to happen. Its impossible to investigate in the same way as physical issues. What if the model is open-source, who is responsible then? What if it's open source but another process altered the weights?
When you say infinite loops, you mean infinite indirection, but obviously no such thing exists, because computer systems, just like other physical things, exist in physical space, not on the astral plane.
Whoever had agency to start the domino effect carries the liability. Doesn’t matter if the model is open source or if you brewed it home. And if you weaponize OpenAI’s models through their servers, it would likely be shared liability. Yours would be malice, theirs would be negligence.
Which judge will go down the rabbit hole of figuring this out? How will they do it? Will they have people tracing logs over 5000$? And if they do get there, in your fictional world, at some point, after 1 year of investigations and back-and-forth, it's okay, the technology is beyond what it was before, it's not relevant anymore, new technologies and new methods.
Obviously you’re going to keep the model behind an API and be very selective about the people allowed to call and the queries it’s willing to answer, in that case. As Anthropic has done with Fable. But that is voluntary restraint - mostly in today’s regime we get frontier capabilities in open weight models on a ~year delay.
There is no user-involved damage. No one is recklessly running agents by the thousands without air-gapped containers, except “the people” than run these labs.
What defines a model? What defines ownership of a process? If I make a wrapper to a remote VM that builds and executed a prompt, am I accountable?
When I worked at a company in the EU, it was enough to apply a reversible linear transform to the data for it to be considered GDPR safe-according according to legal definition as long as the transform details were stored separately.
Hell, you can slip and fall and hold the cleaning company accountable. (This might be a US thing. Likely because that fall might cost a lot in medical expenses, and your insurance will do whatever it takes to pass the liability.)