When someone is risking the future of the entire human race, we’ll see whistleblowers give up their jobs and risk their freedom and fortune to take action.
There are already AGI lab leaders that are risking the future of the entire human race.
There’s nothing to blow the whistle on. Everyone knows that those labs are pursuing AGI.
We are not in direct danger yet, in all likelihood. I have short timelines, but there’s almost no chance that any current work is at risk of growing smart enough to disempower humans. There’s a difference between hitting the accelerator in the direction of a cliff, and holding it down as it gets close. Developing AGI internally is when we’ll need and hopefullly get whistleblowers.
Are you thinking of blowing the whistle on something in between work on AGI and getting close to actually achieving it?
Are you thinking of blowing the whistle on something in between work on AGI and getting close to actually achieving it?
Good question.
Yes, this is how I am thinking about it.
I don’t want to wait until competing AI corporations become really good at automating work in profitable ways, also because by then their market and political power would be entrenched. I want society to be well-aware way before then that the AI corporations are acting recklessly, and should be restricted.
We need a bigger safety margin. Waiting until corporate machinery is able to operate autonomously would leave us almost no remaining safety margin.
There are already increasing harms, and a whistleblower can bring those harms to the surface. That in turn supports civil lawsuits, criminal investigations, and/or regulator actions.
Harms that fall roughly in these categories – from most directly traceable to least directly traceable:
Data laundering (what personal, copyrighted and illegal data is being copied and collected en masse without our consent).
Worker dehumanisation (the algorithmic exploitation of gig workers; the shoddy automation of people’s jobs; the criminal conduct of lab CEOs)
Unsafe uses (everything from untested uses in hospitals and schools, to mass disinformation and deepfakes, to hackability and covered-up adversarial attacks, to automating crime and the kill cloud, to knowingly building dangerous designs).
Environmental pollution (research investigations of data centers, fab labs, and so on)
For example:
If an engineer revealed authors’ works in the datasets of ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Llama that would give publishers and creative guilds the evidence they need to ramp up lawsuits against the respective corporations (to the tens or hundreds).
If managers were aware of the misuses of their technology, eg. in healthcare, at schools, or in warfare, but chose to keep quiet about it.
Revealing illegal data laundering is actually the most direct, and would cause immediate uproar. The rest is harder and more context-dependent. I don’t think we’re at the stage where environmental pollution is that notable (vs. the fossil fuel industry at large), and investigating it across AI hardware operation and production chains would take a lot of diligent research as an inside staff member.
Note: Even if you are focussed on long-term risks, you can still whistleblow on eggregious harms caused by these AI labs right now. Providing this evidence enables legal efforts to restrict these labs.
Whistleblowing is not going to solve the entire societal governance problem, but it will enable others to act on the information you provided.
It is much better than following along until we reached the edge of the cliff.
There are already AGI lab leaders that are risking the future of the entire human race.
Plenty of consensus to be found on that.
So why no whistleblowing?
There’s nothing to blow the whistle on. Everyone knows that those labs are pursuing AGI.
We are not in direct danger yet, in all likelihood. I have short timelines, but there’s almost no chance that any current work is at risk of growing smart enough to disempower humans. There’s a difference between hitting the accelerator in the direction of a cliff, and holding it down as it gets close. Developing AGI internally is when we’ll need and hopefullly get whistleblowers.
Are you thinking of blowing the whistle on something in between work on AGI and getting close to actually achieving it?
Good question.
Yes, this is how I am thinking about it.
I don’t want to wait until competing AI corporations become really good at automating work in profitable ways, also because by then their market and political power would be entrenched. I want society to be well-aware way before then that the AI corporations are acting recklessly, and should be restricted.
We need a bigger safety margin. Waiting until corporate machinery is able to operate autonomously would leave us almost no remaining safety margin.
There are already increasing harms, and a whistleblower can bring those harms to the surface. That in turn supports civil lawsuits, criminal investigations, and/or regulator actions.
Harms that fall roughly in these categories – from most directly traceable to least directly traceable:
Data laundering (what personal, copyrighted and illegal data is being copied and collected en masse without our consent).
Worker dehumanisation (the algorithmic exploitation of gig workers; the shoddy automation of people’s jobs; the criminal conduct of lab CEOs)
Unsafe uses (everything from untested uses in hospitals and schools, to mass disinformation and deepfakes, to hackability and covered-up adversarial attacks, to automating crime and the kill cloud, to knowingly building dangerous designs).
Environmental pollution (research investigations of data centers, fab labs, and so on)
For example:
If an engineer revealed authors’ works in the datasets of ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Llama that would give publishers and creative guilds the evidence they need to ramp up lawsuits against the respective corporations (to the tens or hundreds).
Or if it turned out that the companies collected known child sexual abuse materials (as OpenAI probably did, and a collaborator of mine revealed for StabilityAI and MidJourney).
If the criminal conduct of the CEO of an AI corporation was revealed
Eg. it turned out that there is a string of sexual predation/assault in leadership circles of OpenAI/CodePilot/Microsoft.
Or it turned out that Satya Nadella managed a refund scam company in his spare time.
If managers were aware of the misuses of their technology, eg. in healthcare, at schools, or in warfare, but chose to keep quiet about it.
Revealing illegal data laundering is actually the most direct, and would cause immediate uproar.
The rest is harder and more context-dependent. I don’t think we’re at the stage where environmental pollution is that notable (vs. the fossil fuel industry at large), and investigating it across AI hardware operation and production chains would take a lot of diligent research as an inside staff member.
Note:
Even if you are focussed on long-term risks, you can still whistleblow on eggregious harms caused by these AI labs right now. Providing this evidence enables legal efforts to restrict these labs.
Whistleblowing is not going to solve the entire societal governance problem, but it will enable others to act on the information you provided.
It is much better than following along until we reached the edge of the cliff.