Early on I wrote a script for my user account to run df and save the output to a file, then a second script to read that file and if the drive was full send me an email.

First, it failed because it couldn’t send the email because the email service failed under full disk conditions.

Second, it failed because it couldn’t write the file to disk because the disk was full.

Third, it failed because outbound SMTP was blocked by my ISP.

I learned a lot about how well you can fail if you really put your mind to it. Now I have Home Assistant grabbing the disk stats for my machines and flagging anything over 90%.

I agree, you would have a hard time pushing for the intent part of a crime, however manslaughter does not require intent, nor do many other crimes, and discovery would being many documents to light which may show the level of intent or reckless disregard. Also, what is the difference between intent and callous disregard? If you know your actions will cause deaths and you do not act to prevent those deaths then are you not choosing those deaths? If there is a discussion documented where the possibility is raised and then disregarded it would show at least knowing disregard for the safety and wellbeing of others.

If I, and Australian citizen, had gained access in the same way I would be facing charges. Those charges would likely be under the Cybercrime Act of 2001.

s.478.1(1) Criminal Code—unauthorised access to, or modification of, restricted data;

That carries a maximum 2 year sentence and it clearly a significant threat to an individual.

Will Sam Altman face this charge? No. The purpose of the AI in this situation is not to do the actual hacking. The purpose it to abrogate the blame, to shield the owners of it from legal repercussions. Altman and co can do whatever they want and shift the blame to the AI.

“We didn’t fire missiles at those children, the AI made a mistake and identified them as hostile actors”

“We didn’t deny your dead partner’s healthcare, the algorithm incorrectly labeled the procedure as unnecessary and due to the delay your partner died, but that wasn’t our fault, it was the algorithm.”

I think your situation is exactly what a cooperative is built for. You have a bunch of people who work together and have a shared ownership of the business, tying their outcomes to the success of the business. You organise democratically to delegate the work and get the results you need. Someone good at sales can handle the sales side of things. Someone skilled in web design can make the web site. Someone such as yourself may work on a specific project for a client. The structure all together can do the work required while also managing having visibility, discover ability, and reputation. And if it isn’t working you can vote to change what you are doing.

I agree. I have run a few models on my phone and server and they are interesting but on such weak hardware they are slow and less capable. That said, a project like KDE has a certain amount of funding which could be put to use in part finding bugs using AI tools. They could be run on reasonable hardware with all the ethical safeguards we could come up with and have it be the least awful version possible. Some would argue it would still be unethical and I can see their perspective. That said, for me this is the line we should not cross. Keep the development by humans and for humans, and if we are to use AI models then we should be doing so to find problems to work on, not to solve them.

Maybe I am the weird one but I have a split view on using AI tools. Using AI to find bugs and exploits makes sense. It can attack in ways humans will rarely think about and find bugs humans may not have considered. It can use used to fuzz large attack surfaces and find patterns which we can then fix.

Using AI to do the actual coding is far less reasonable in my view. Studies do show a decline in productivity, enjoyment, and quality of code when using AI tools.

So for finding problems to address AI seems great. It is one of many tools which can help us find problems worth addressing. But for solving those problems? No, it is not fit for that purpose. It does not produce good code with maintainability and legibility for the maintainers of the code.

Not the OP, but I have a different perspective you may find useful.

Productivity has increased due to automation and mechanisation. The same number of labour hours produces more output. That means that if we wanted the same output we could put in fewer hours to get it.

Wages have not matched this growth since the 80s. Productivity went up, production went up, but wages stayed flat. So for the same number of hours of work we get the same amount of money, but the produced output is higher. Where does the difference in output go?

It goes to the owners, the rich, the class of people who by virtue of owning the factory, company, means of production, and they get all of those extra bits of value without expending any more effort or innovating in any meaningful way. They bring in automation and mechanisation and increase the productivity of the employee without compensating them more for it.

They then continue increasing their wealth by turning everything into a comodity, something that can be made into a financial instrument and traded. They wrap housing up in REITs and healthcare in health insurance companies. They make everything work for their personal wealth and give nothing back.

So in a sane society if you wanted your cup of coffee in the morning it would cost half or less of what it did in the 80s, so you could afford it with half as many hours of your labour. If it took you an hour of labour to afford a week of coffee in the 80s then now it should take 15-30 minutes instead. You should have more free time.

So yes, people would still work at this point. In the future some things would be completely automated and you would not have to pay any meaningful cost for them, they would be essentially free. Other things would be harder to automate and you would still have to exchange hours of your time to afford them. One day everything would be fully automated including the machines to maintain the machines and no human effort would be required to have a decent standard of living, so you could spend time engaging with people, exploring the universe, learning about how things work, making art, and enjoying culture. Essentially, Star Trek.

Nah, it is all transparent for me. I don’t decide to run something with the dedicated graphics, it just runs as needed it seems. Maybe I have it misconfigured and it is using the dedicated graphics all the time, I’m not sure, but it works fairly well given the hardware it has.