AI & Skin in the game

Societies are built upon skin in the game. When people have skin in the game (especially decision-makers and "influencers"), societies thrive, and when they do not, they collapse.

As Taleb explained in his homonymous book, skin in the game is not just shared incentives, but a filtering mechanism. Fines incentivize drivers not to break speed limits but do not prevent them from doing it. Crashes and driving license suspensions do.

How does skin in the game apply to AI?

Should it be applied to its developers (they are punished when their AI does something very bad), to the AI itself (the algorithm is thrashed), or both?

Just yesterday, WIRED published an article whose headline is: "Air Canada Has to Honor a Refund Policy Its Chatbot Made Up."

What's interesting is that Air Canada argued in court that "the chatbot is a separate legal entity that is responsible for its own actions."

As Chris Farnell noted, funnily enough, the legal case for robot personhood didn't begin with a robot on trial for murder, as science fiction writers imagined, but with an airline wanting to get out of paying a refund.

The reason skin in the game works is that humans cannot be easily replicated, so when you jail a criminal, you significantly reduce the local population of criminals. But with AIs, once you "jail a chatbot," how can you prevent ten siblings from being created and doing more damage?

I think that this is the core question that will have to be answered to significantly reduce one of the sources of AI risk.

(Find here my thoughts about AI risk.)

Managing Hybrid Teams

I just published a book titled "Managing Hybrid and Remote Teams" (eBook, paperback). It is basically the second edition of my 2023 book "Managing Remote Teams," with some additions.

Here are the main changes: I added a chapter on team engagement, made a video course available as an add-on, produced a paperback version, added downloadable checklists, and a few more small changes.

As usual, readers who purchased the first edition from my online shop should find the new edition in their library.