David GerardTIL that saying "holy shit don't use ChatGPT for medical advice" is a "purity test". i didn't know that before. in fact I still don't.
Charlie Stross@davidgerard I am pretty sure that OpenAI do not have a license to practice medicine and are not a (human) member of the BMA so by giving medical advice they (the humans responsible for the software) are potentially committing an imprisonable offense ...
Jer@cstross @davidgerard who will you imprison? The ceo? The programmers? The qa team?
One of the big draws of tech is the ability to turn human error (and malfeasance) into "computer error". And society has been trained to believe software errors aren't anyone's fault so there's no one to hold accountable
That needs to change. Companies need to be accountable for their "computer errors" - especially when they're baked into design and not actually errors
Krzysztof Sakrejda@wronglang @cstross @davidgerard I actually agree. It would certainly justify the vast amounts of money they make if they had to take personal responsibility for their harmful decisions. Might make them think a little harder about their decisions
@Jer @cstross @davidgerard I'm into it and I'm also not sure it's necessary. A corporation is just a bunch of greedy people in a trench coat. If you hurt the board with financial consequences for the company that CEO is going to get hurt in the way the care about the most. The broader problem is that we don't properly enforce consequences for companies at all even when the law is pretty clear.
@wronglang @Jer @davidgerard No, the CEO is only hurt *very indirectly* and usually they'll have moved on to another job (with better pay/options) before the pigeons come home to roost. Consider it took more than two decades for the OxyContin scandal to lead to court verdicts, and the Purdue owners still escaped most liability for thousands of deaths by declaring bankruptcy. How many CEOs did Purdue have during that period?
David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)@cstross @wronglang @Jer @davidgerard
Exactly.
When the board votes out a CEO, they lose all unvested stock. All of the salary that they’ve received and all stock that they have that has vested remains theirs. This is normally (for a moderately large company) enough money to live comfortably for the rest of their lives without working.
I would happily endure this ‘punishment’.
@david_chisnall @cstross @Jer @davidgerard yes but we only do mock punishments
edit: my point is that both are options, if we're talking about modifying the law either mechanism could work iff actually applied.
@wronglang @david_chisnall @Jer @davidgerard I think a more urgent need is to globally abolish corporate personhood and apply criminal liability law for corporate harms to the individuals who caused the harm. Cut back companies to being a money shelter again, but not a responsibility shelter.
@cstross @wronglang @Jer @davidgerard
The laws in most places allow prosecuting individual members of a company, the difficulty is proving who in a diffuse group that all signed off on part of something is actually responsible. Targeting the company in addition is intended to act as a disincentive by applying financial penalties that make the cost:benefit calculations different. Sadly, the costs are rarely high enough to matter.
The only de jure liability shield that incorporation gives is for shareholders. And this can go away in some cases. Both the UK and USA have a legal notion of ‘piercing the corporate veil’ that can, in extreme cases, make the owners of a company liable.
@david_chisnall @wronglang @Jer @davidgerard That right there is where we need to lean hard into applying the "joint enterprise" doctrine in prosecution. *Everybody* who signed off on it is responsible. If it's a committee? Fine, the committee goes to prison unless they can individually point to a paper trail documenting their objections.
@cstross @wronglang @Jer @davidgerard
And the minimum-wage person who actually did the illegal thing, but was threatened with being fired and losing their home if they didn’t? And the paper trail that says everyone on the committee voted against it, but this rogue employee did the illegal thing unsupervised?
Whistleblower protections would need to be orders of magnitude stronger for this to be enforceable (something I would be very much in favour of).
@david_chisnall @wronglang @Jer @davidgerard Yep, we need stronger whistleblower protections. An assumption that "blame the messenger" is the default company response to whistle-blowing should be baked-in and determine the outcome of wrongful dismissal cases for *any cause whatsoever* for several years after the incident.