OK. I'm going to set aside the (bad) analogy between airplane software and LLMs
for a moment. The important thing there is that if your offline computer does
something wrong, you can set it on fire and get another one. And if an airplane
does something wrong, you can also set it on fire. Even if we've oversimplified
the causal network, there *is* a locally scoped thing we can set on fire.
Boeing, the corporation, is *not* guilty of fraud. Unless you buy Citizens
United v FEC, corporations are relatively loose couplings of moral agents, not
moral agents themselves. The typical way to hold Boeing accountable is a
pass-through to its directors, officers, and shareholders. Employees are pretty
far down the ratchet. But our legal mechanisms do still work. And they scale.
Humans are also composites (though more tightly organized than corporations).
And if you've got a broken component (like schizophrenia), we treat you
differently than if all your components seem to be within tolerance. Such
accountability relies on our ability to interpret and/or explain your
organization/composition [⛧]. And, as I mentioned, maybe we get it wrong a lot.
But it's pretty easy to delist the corp. Revoke the charter. Anti-monopoly it.
Shoot the officers on the sidewalk. Etc. Problem solved.
LLMs are different. Unlike corporations and, e.g., your Calendar App on your
phone, there are components for which we lack (global)
explanations/interpretations for their capabilities/behaviors. And when
recursive self-improvement breaks through, we'll never catch up. The obvious
thing to do then, is to somehow coax them into patching our legal system *or*
coming up with their own legal system, again of which we'll know very little.
[⛧] It's tempting to claim that ∃ components of the human that also lack
explanation/interpretation. But I'd claim that's not true. We've been studying
ourselves since soon after we could study ourselves. So we've kinda got the
tolerances well estimated. And even if we don't, we can just puncture your skin
a little bit and move on. There are plenty more where you came from.
On 9/4/25 6:57 AM, Prof David West wrote:
It is not just LLMs—all software, for whatever purpose, is unencumbered by any
form of accountability, as are those who create it.
I was the case (probably still is) that you could not call yourself a software
'engineer' in TX, precisely because you were not accountable for your work;
unlike the other engineering professions.
Even in cases like Boeing, the company is guilty of fraud vis-a-vis the
regulatory process, not for bad software. None of the developers of that
software were held accountable. Even should they have been, until the last two
years or so, they would have switched jobs (likely at a higher salary) within a
week or so.
davew
On Thu, Sep 4, 2025, at 8:03 AM, glen wrote:
IDK. But I guess I'm coming to the conclusion that what's actually
missing from the LLMs is something like accountability. Even though
cause is almost always artificially scoped, the assignment of
blame-credit it allows is important. So asking for a way to prompt the
machine to recapitulate a person and and elevating the medium to the
message are both insufficient.
For the former, even if that person got the prompts that could act as a
hot-swap for Marcus, there would be nobody to blame-credit for the
output, no place for the buck to stop. Similarly for the latter, it's
difficult to blame the kids these days for believing the nonsense
peddled by Joe Rogan or the "Sleepless Historian" youtube channel.
They're embedded in the medium. There's nobody *to* blame.
Nevermind the debilitating Terms and Conditions, when Kimi K2 generates
complete bullsh¡t, there's no one there to blame. Sure, the user has
some share of responsibility to knead their prompts, understand the
tool, etc. But a not insignificant share is there in the Foundation,
obscurely derived from an even further blameless stigmergic corpus.
I forget who it was that said there should be a death penalty for
corporations. The same is true for LLMs. If Claude convinces a teen to
commit suicide, Claude should be held accountable. What I think I'm
getting at with "function is a slave to form" is this *smearing* of
causality into an amorphous field. Nobody's there to take the blame or
credit. All punishment and reward is false and arbitrary.
At least when the inference engine is contained in a bag of skin, we
can pop the bag and move on.
On 9/3/25 12:36 PM, Frank Wimberly wrote:
The medium is the message? "Young man, I AM Marshal McCluhan!"
On 9/3/25 1:59 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
Glen writes:
"This is because the LLMs absolutely suck at saying things the way I want them
said. "
Someone asked me to create a set of prompts to preserve (my) institutional
knowledge.
Remarkably insulting, and even more damning to the person asking for it!
--
¡sıɹƎ ןıɐH ⊥ ɐןןǝdoɹ ǝ uǝןƃ
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