I understood that the baseline that you presented was a description of what happens by default, but I wondered if there was a way to differentiate between different judgements on what happens by default. Intuitively, killing someone by not doing something feels different from not killing someone by not doing something.
So my question was a check to see if impact measures considered such judgements (which apparently they don’t) and if they didn’t, what was the problem.
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 understood that the baseline that you presented was a description of what happens by default, but I wondered if there was a way to differentiate between different judgements on what happens by default. Intuitively, killing someone by not doing something feels different from not killing someone by not doing something.
So my question was a check to see if impact measures considered such judgements (which apparently they don’t) and if they didn’t, what was the problem.
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?