I would say that impact measures don’t consider these kinds of judgments. The “doing nothing” baseline can be seen as analogous to the agent never being deployed, e.g. in the Low Impact AI paper. If the agent is never deployed, and someone dies in the meantime, then it’s not the agent’s responsibility and is not part of the agent’s impact on the world.
I think the intuition you are describing partly arises from the choice of language: “killing someone by not doing something” vs “someone dying while you are doing nothing”. The word “killing” is an active verb that carries a connotation of responsibility. If you taboo this word, does your question persist?
I would say that impact measures don’t consider these kinds of judgments. The “doing nothing” baseline can be seen as analogous to the agent never being deployed, e.g. in the Low Impact AI paper. If the agent is never deployed, and someone dies in the meantime, then it’s not the agent’s responsibility and is not part of the agent’s impact on the world.
I think the intuition you are describing partly arises from the choice of language: “killing someone by not doing something” vs “someone dying while you are doing nothing”. The word “killing” is an active verb that carries a connotation of responsibility. If you taboo this word, does your question persist?