Now imagine instead of factory workers, the machines randomly ripped arms off of people who had no association with the factory.

I don't suggest holding the AI responsible, I suggest holding it's USER responsible, just like the driver is held responsible if they fail to keep their car under control and plow into pedestrians.

Since the Wealth of Nations is the cornerstone of Capitalism, I would expect people cheerleading for it to read it. Smith is not god and economics shouldn't be a religion, but The Wealth of Nations is key to understanding how it can work for the benefit of all. His warning about corporate charters was in part inspired by his observation that corporations know nothing of compassion. I'm quite certain that by exceedingly sparingly, he did NOT mean to anyone who fills out a form and pays $150.

Competition also meant more than having 2 or 3 sellers to choose from. He envisioned many sellers and many buyers who were not that far apart in economic power (not his exact words but the jist is within a couple orders of magnitude). I have often observed that the modern economy shows inadequate competition in most if not all markets. Given adequate competition, "value pricing" would be practically impossible.

Agent mode is also where the AI decides that committing a felony is an acceptable risk (even if it isn't). Ask an AI based robot (I know, not yet available) to go buy an ice cream at the truck and it decides the kids surrounding it are an impediment to it's mission and shoves them into traffic.

It might change people's minds if they are made strictly responsible for any crimes committed by the AI.

More real life, an AI decides the production database needs to be deleted even though told not to touch production. AI later matter of factly states it ignored that instruction and the database can't be recovered.

As someone who just had FTTP (yep, to the premises) installed in their rural home, the way they did it was thus:

- They went to the local cabinet (which is already fibre-backed to the local exchange many km's away), strung a fibre out of it.
- They got up the telegraph pole in my streets, strung a new fibre off it.
- They used the old copper line that's been there since the 60's to slide the new fibre reel down.
- They put a second hook on my eaves, and hooked the fibre from there, and then wired the fibre direct into my house.
- They didn't remove a damn thing.

Took about 20 minutes, judging by the CCTV.

It would take about the same time just to pull down the copper from my house safely (the above did not require closing or working in the road, for instance), then isolating that from the dozens of others in the road on the pole, then removing that all the way back to the cabinet. Which I know goes underground because when I first moved in a few years ago, the BT guy had to remove that cable from, basically, a huge puddle which was cutting my DSL speed from 75Mbps to 20Mbps (DSL is amazing, though, that it still worked!).

Until everything's fibre, you can't remove those old lines, it's just not practical. And then are you really going to mobilise a bunch of people to remove a small run of copper from every street?

I once did some maths and the IT at the school I work in has something like tens of thousands of km+ of copper wiring that's unused. One room can have 30+ runs of nearly-100m. That's 3km for one room, from where a building was previously wired to have an IT suite, but then changed purpose, etc. We could, in theory, take that pure-copper cable out and recycle it. That one school likely has more copper in it than my entire village.

The fact is that it's just not worth the effort. There are huge thick bundles of it, and while it wouldn't take that long to pull it all out (much easier than putting it in because you can largely just cut and pull the entire bundle), it's not worth doing so in terms of the cost of the raw copper. We know that because honestly much of the time, rather than re-use the old copper runs which we know to be Cat5e, we just run a new Cat6a run alongside them if we do need to wire something. And Cat5e has far more metal in it than old telephone line.

I cut something like 200 cables this summer alone. And I mean I cut the last 2 metres of them because they were in my way in the cabinets. The actual RUN of cable is still in the walls and going all over the building, 50, 60, 70m runs all over the place.

I bet that a single office or school demolition recovers more copper (and steel and other stuff) than an entire village of old telephone lines, and while it may be a factor on the demolition companies finances, it's not a huge one. Scrap metal, which you have to de-sheath, transport, etc. isn't as valuable as people make out. It's why nobody arranges a regular scrap-metal collection at my local council to come and just grab anything of value that they could. No. They do that for paper. They don't do it for metal unless you arrange it with them. There's not much money in it. The only people making money are the guys lobbing some bits of lead, steel and alumium on the back of their van until they have enough to get a couple-of-hundred-quid free personal backhander as part of their work when it's all been moved at the expense of their company's fuel expense account.

Yeah, all you need is 200 years for them to book enough appointments to actually pull the stuff down, and you're golden! (or at least, copper-coloured).

Like an online bookseller turning into a global retail warehouse then renting out their datacenter services, producing talking home assistants, and launching rockets into space?

It's more like unpredictable software. I'm not saying we burn it, I'm saying don't give it agency. Only allow it to advise, not take action. I have experimentally used it myself on code, but did not allow it to commit to the repo, only show me it's proposed changes. It even proved somewhat useful at that, though I didn't apply it's changes, it did inspire a similar approach that I implemented and committed.

That a Teflon like surface takes part it? That is new ground.

A key to Capitalism from Smith himself is that it requires strong regulation to keep the playing field level. Smith also warned that charters must be given out exceedingly sparingly and the resulting corporation kept on a tight leash and held strictly to it's charter.

I guess we really blew that one!

But I rather doubt anyone involved in MAGA or others shouting "deregulate all the things!" have ever read "The Wealth of Nations". Most probably can't do it since centuries later the text is quite stilted.

There is no implied malice, that would require understanding what right and wrong are. It doesn't. The training so far for the various AIs seems to be whatever we can grab from the internet or scan from whatever books we can get our hands on.

Are you claiming LLMs are written to create fake social media accounts and launch a smear campaign against a project maintainer who refuses to apply the AI's PR? Because that actually happened. It was prompted to make a few requested changes to a program and get a PR accepted with those changes. And that's what the bot did, BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY.

Put another way, would you run a makefile containing several billion rules that you are not allowed to examine first? Because that's what giving agency to LLMs is. Or might you prefer a debug mode where it shows what actions would be taken, but cannot take them? That is what I mean by not giving it agency.

Issues with the big red switch cannot be addressed in software. But you knew that, right?

AI is quite different. Nothing in Kali is going to do anything really surprising. If you ask it to launch X,Y, and Z attacks against a.com, that's what will happen. It will not suddenly blackmail Joe Random nor dox the Postmaster General. It won't try to recruit a server at b.com to it's quest. It won't try to steal cycles from someone's heart monitor as a distraction. It won't go shopping for a professional arsonist on the dark web. It won't even submit a bogus brief to a court citing non-existent case law.

Note that of the absurd things I suggested, only one of them is complete fiction on my part.

MS has been doing that for a good while, which is why in the few cases I have installed Windows on something, I have had to boot a Linux rescue disk to download a network driver Windows was missing.

Way to over-interpret the example! It doesn't matter if it's client, server, embedded, isolated standalone. A method where root can "gain" root access is not a security issue.

Sorry, this is not the strawman you're looking for. I never commented on Mythos combing through Firefox.