Judge Easterbrook on AI Risk

The venerable Judge Easterbrook appears to understand harms from unaligned AI. In this excerpt, he invokes a favorite fictional example among the AI risk community:

The situation is this: Customer incurs a debt and does not pay. Creditor hires Bill Collector to dun Customer for the money. Bill Collector puts a machine on the job and repeatedly calls Cell Number, at which Customer had agreed to receive phone calls by giving his number to Creditor. The machine, called a predictive dialer, works autonomously until a human voice comes on the line. If that happens, an employee in Bill Collector's call center will join the call. But Customer no longer subscribes to Cell Number, which has been reassigned to Bystander. A human being who called Cell Number would realize that Customer was no longer the subscriber. But predictive dialers lack human intelligence and, like the buckets enchanted by the Sorcerer's Apprentice, continue until stopped by their true master. Meanwhile Bystander is out of pocket the cost of the airtime minutes and has had to listen to a lot of useless voicemail.

Soppet v. Enhanced Recovery Co., LLC, 679 F.3d 637, 638–39 (7th Cir. 2012) (citation omitted).