I guess I’m confused about the path by which you hope to get the external incentives to be created.
The way I’m thinking of it, this sentence seems to imply that AI development wouldn’t be facing any external incentives right now. But everyone is always operating under some set of external incentives, which unavoidably shape their behavior. And if they’re not intentionally designed ones, they are likely to be bad ones.
So the way I’d phrase it now, my proposal is neither “push for external incentives like law and get input from AI researchers in drafting them”, nor “establish voluntary codes to buy into and make them into external incentives later”. Rather it’s “get the AI researchers to give their input on what the current external incentives are like and how they could be better, and then use whatever policy instruments are available to shift those incentives to be more like the better ones”.
E.g. to take the specific example of liability legislation; there are already existing laws that are going to be applied if an AI system gets out of control and kills people. Is that existing legal framework, and the way it’s likely to be applied, good or bad for encouraging the kinds of behavior we’d like to see from AI developers? I don’t know, but at least I know that it was never designed with this specific intent in mind, so there may be things to improve on there.
The way I’m thinking of it, this sentence seems to imply that AI development wouldn’t be facing any external incentives right now. But everyone is always operating under some set of external incentives, which unavoidably shape their behavior. And if they’re not intentionally designed ones, they are likely to be bad ones.
So the way I’d phrase it now, my proposal is neither “push for external incentives like law and get input from AI researchers in drafting them”, nor “establish voluntary codes to buy into and make them into external incentives later”. Rather it’s “get the AI researchers to give their input on what the current external incentives are like and how they could be better, and then use whatever policy instruments are available to shift those incentives to be more like the better ones”.
E.g. to take the specific example of liability legislation; there are already existing laws that are going to be applied if an AI system gets out of control and kills people. Is that existing legal framework, and the way it’s likely to be applied, good or bad for encouraging the kinds of behavior we’d like to see from AI developers? I don’t know, but at least I know that it was never designed with this specific intent in mind, so there may be things to improve on there.
Ah, I see, that makes sense, thanks for clarifying!