The Shapley Share of Responsibility?

• AI News Team
• April 14, 2026

​Deepfates on twitter wrote:If you’re in a theater and you shout “Fire!”, and the audience reacts predictably and in the process trample someone to death, are you responsible? What if there was no fire? What if you legitimately believed it was a fire, does that make it okay? Does it depend on evidence?I tried to give it a serious answer, and I wanted to check in with The LW Folk if this answer made sense to others here.ii. Shapley SharesMy actual answer, within frame, is “You have some share of responsibility.” The exact share depends on the exact situation.(I think the first order thing to be checking is “was there a fire, or not?”. But, for now, answering the question as-asked)I think people have some responsibility for the second-order effects of their actions, and “how much?” depends on, like, how second-order it was.Something something “shapley value?” I realize shapley value is intractable to calculate in most cases, but, is suggestive of what shape of answer you’d get if you were omniscientIf you were the only person shouting fire and there was exactly one person who did the trampling, maybe (I’m not actually 100% sure how shapley value works) they both get 50% of the credit/blame (if it turns out that if you remove either of you, it wouldn’t have happened)If you’re in a different situation where lots of people are shouting things like “fire” all the time. (for example, some people shouting “AI will kill us” and some people shouting “billionaires are evil, eat the rich”), then the blame is more distributed. Exactly how distributed depends on the circumstances. The question “okay, what is society supposed to do about that?” needs to take into account what sort of norms are practical to enforce. There’s a theoretic answer to ‘who is responsible’ and a practical ‘who are we going to prioritize holding accountable.’I think it’s a correct norm to be “people who shout ‘Fire’ are responsible for putting effort into doing so in a way that mitigates the tailrisk side effects.” For example “Guys there’s a fire, please walk calmly toward the exits”. But, if the people are not listening to the warning there is a fire, and there _were_ a fire… you’d probably rather the guy shout “Fire!” more emphatically than not do that. He is maybe 50% responsible for the guy getting trampled in the narrow simplified case (the rest of the responsibility distributed among the panicking people). But, also he gets credit for saving the other people….I realize this is a lot trickier when smart people disagree about whether there’s a fire, or will be, and some of the arguments are quite complicated. I don’t think there’s a shortcut to looking into the details of the particular case, which includes “was there a fire or not?” and “what else was going on?”, etc.ii. Cooperation among people who disagree on what is true and what is goodI think your more broadly getting at “how do people who disagree about what’s true and what’s good, cooperate?”I think this is also kinda confusing and hard. But, listing out the obvious background parts of my viewpoint here (I expect this will not feel as novel to you).a) ~Everyone probably agrees that ‘fully evaluate every claim and the consequences of every action’ is intractable, so we need simplified rulesb) Currently, we have a distinction between “what gets punished via governmental force (i.e. law) and what gets punished via social censure.” I’m not sure if this is a natural carving, but, it seems pretty good. The downstream consequences of arguing “there is a danger!” are chaotic enough I don’t think it usually makes sense to be a thing that gets legally prosecuted. But on the meta-level, it seems fine for there to be some public arguments and tug-of-war around what gets social-censure.But another layer of confusion here is “what do you do, when you believe something to be true, that implies a kind of totalizing worldview?”. I think the memeplex around “ASI is on it’s way and how it shakes out will determine the course of the future” is somewhat intrinsically totalizing.I think it’s true. I don’t have a super principled answer other than “just, try not to be totalized about it.”I think it is correct for the social-judgment-sphere to have an immune system against totalizing beliefs. I also think the social-judgment-sphere needs to have a way of processing arguments that are pretty plausibly true, and that skew totalizing for many modern human psychologies.(I think the way most people should engage with “AI might kill everyone or ruin the future” is, mostly, to call their senators a couple times and mostly get back to their lives)I think it’s correct, for that immune system, to pressure the people saying the totalizing-prone-thing to go out of their way to do an extra good job ameliorating the damage. But, there are still limits to what’s reasonable to expect there.I also think it’s also the responsibility of the rest of society to be tracking what people actually said, not merely blaming the guy yelling “Fire” but also the guys making up stuff about what the guy yelling “Fire” said, etc.And, while this isn’t true for arbitrary arguments, I think the threat of negative superintelligence honestly is clear and obvious enough (at least in magnitude, and the risk being nontrivial), that the rest of the social-sphere has the responsibility of taking the argument seriously. That’s the other side of the handshake on “put extra effort into not being totalizing.”It’s sort of necessary for messages to get simplified at scale. I already had “make sure whatever political process is happening is sane and reasonable and non-polarized” as a primary goal, but, I’ve updated in the past few days about the importance of having a clear succinct message that simultaneously conveys the gravity while also having some “and don’t be crazy about it” energy.Discuss ​Read More