A bit of a rant, yes, but some good thoughts here.
I agree that unenforceable regulation can be a bad thing. On the other hand, it can also work in some limited ways. For example, the international agreements against heritable human genetic engineering seem to have held up fairly well. But I think that that requires supporting facts about the world to be true. It needs to not be obviously highly profitable to defectors, it needs to be relatively inaccessible to most people (requiring specialized tech and knowledge), it needs to fit with our collective intuitions (bio-engineering humans seems kinda icky to a lot of people).
The trouble is, all of these things fail to help us with the problem of dangerous AI! As you point out, many bitcoin miners have plenty of GPUs to be dangerous if we get even a couple more orders-of-magnitude algorithmic efficiency improvements. So it’s accessible. AI and AGI offer many tempting ways to acquire power and money in society. So it’s immediately and incrementally profitable. People aren’t as widely instinctively outraged by AI experiments as Bio-engineering experiments. So it’s not intuitively repulsive.
So yes, this seems to me to be very much a situation in which we should not place any trust in unenforceable regulation.
I also agree that we probably do need some sort of organization which enforces the necessary protections (detection and destruction) against rogue AI.
And it does seem potentially like a lot of human satisfaction could be bought in the near future with a focus on making sure everyone in the world gets a reasonable minimum amount of satisfaction from their physical and social environments as you describe here:
Usually, the median person is interested in: jobs, a full fridge, rituals, culture, the spread of their opinion leader’s information, dopamine, political and other random and inherited values, life, continuation of life, and the like. Provide a universal way of obtaining this and just monitor it calmly.
As Connor Leahy has said, we should be able to build sufficiently powerful tool-AI to not need to build AGI! Stop while we still have control! Use the wealth to buy off those who would try anyway. Also, build an enforcement agency to stop runaway AI or AI misuse.
I don’t know how we get there from here though.
Also, the offense-dominant weapons development landscape is looking really grim, and I don’t see how to easily patch that.
On the other hand, I don’t think we buy ourselves any chance of victory by trying to gag ourselves for fear of speeding up AGI development. It’s coming soon regardless of what we do! The race is short now, we need to act fast!
I don’t buy the arguments that our discussions here will make a significant impact in the timing of the arrival of AGI. That seems like hubris to me, to imagine we have such substantial effects, just from our discussions.
Code? Yes, code can be dangerous and shouldn’t be published if so.
Sufficiently detailed technical descriptions of potential advancements? Yeah, I can see that being dangerous.
Unsubstantiated commentary about a published paper being interesting and potentially having both capabilities and alignment value? I am unconvinced that such discussions meaningfully impact the experiments being undertaken in AI labs.
A bit of a rant, yes, but some good thoughts here.
I agree that unenforceable regulation can be a bad thing. On the other hand, it can also work in some limited ways. For example, the international agreements against heritable human genetic engineering seem to have held up fairly well. But I think that that requires supporting facts about the world to be true. It needs to not be obviously highly profitable to defectors, it needs to be relatively inaccessible to most people (requiring specialized tech and knowledge), it needs to fit with our collective intuitions (bio-engineering humans seems kinda icky to a lot of people).
The trouble is, all of these things fail to help us with the problem of dangerous AI! As you point out, many bitcoin miners have plenty of GPUs to be dangerous if we get even a couple more orders-of-magnitude algorithmic efficiency improvements. So it’s accessible. AI and AGI offer many tempting ways to acquire power and money in society. So it’s immediately and incrementally profitable. People aren’t as widely instinctively outraged by AI experiments as Bio-engineering experiments. So it’s not intuitively repulsive.
So yes, this seems to me to be very much a situation in which we should not place any trust in unenforceable regulation.
I also agree that we probably do need some sort of organization which enforces the necessary protections (detection and destruction) against rogue AI.
And it does seem potentially like a lot of human satisfaction could be bought in the near future with a focus on making sure everyone in the world gets a reasonable minimum amount of satisfaction from their physical and social environments as you describe here:
As Connor Leahy has said, we should be able to build sufficiently powerful tool-AI to not need to build AGI! Stop while we still have control! Use the wealth to buy off those who would try anyway. Also, build an enforcement agency to stop runaway AI or AI misuse.
I don’t know how we get there from here though.
Also, the offense-dominant weapons development landscape is looking really grim, and I don’t see how to easily patch that.
On the other hand, I don’t think we buy ourselves any chance of victory by trying to gag ourselves for fear of speeding up AGI development. It’s coming soon regardless of what we do! The race is short now, we need to act fast!
I don’t buy the arguments that our discussions here will make a significant impact in the timing of the arrival of AGI. That seems like hubris to me, to imagine we have such substantial effects, just from our discussions.
Code? Yes, code can be dangerous and shouldn’t be published if so.
Sufficiently detailed technical descriptions of potential advancements? Yeah, I can see that being dangerous.
Unsubstantiated commentary about a published paper being interesting and potentially having both capabilities and alignment value? I am unconvinced that such discussions meaningfully impact the experiments being undertaken in AI labs.