Anyway, I did say that I thought there were lots of plausible angles, so I can try to give one. This is very off-the-cuff, it’s not a topic that I have yet thought about much though I expect to at some point.
Example: tagging advanced technology
Let’s say that a technology is “basic” if it is available in 2016; otherwise we say it is “advanced.” We would like to:
1. Give individuals complete liberty when dealing with basic technology.
2. Give individuals considerable liberty when dealing with advanced technology.
3. Prevent attackers from using advanced technologies developed by law-abiding society in order to help do something destructive .
We’ll try to engineer a property of being “tagged,” aiming for the following desiderata:
1. All artifacts embodying advanced technology, produced or partly produced by law-abiding citizens, are tagged.
2. All artifacts produced using tagged artifacts are themselves tagged.
3. Tagged artifacts are not destructive (in the sense of being much more useful for an agent who wants to destroy).
Property #1 is relatively easy to satisfy, since the law can require tagging advanced technology. Ideally tagging will be cheap and compatible with widely held ethical ideals, so that there is little incentive to violate such laws. The difficulty is achieving properties #2 and #3 while remaining cheap / agreeable.
The most brutish way to achieve properties #2 and #3 is to have a government agency X which retains control over all advanced artifacts. When you contribute an artifact to X they issue you a title. The title-holder can tell X what to do with an advanced artifact, and X will honor those recommendations so long as (1) the proposed use is not destructive, and (2) the proposed use does not conflict with X’s monopoly on control of advanced artifacts. The title-holder is responsible for bearing the costs associated with maintaining X’s monopoly — for example, if a title-holder would like to used advanced artifacts in a factory in Nevada, then X will need to physically defend that factory, and the title-holder must pay the associated costs.
(In this case, tagging = “controlled by X.”)
This system is problematic for a number of reasons. In particular: (1) it provides an objectionable level of power to the organization X itself, (2) it may impose significant overhead on the use of advanced artifacts, (3) it only works so long as X is able to understand the consequences of actions recommended by title-holders (further increasing overhead and invasiveness).
More clever tagging schemes can ameliorate these difficulties, and AI seems very helpful for that. For example, if we were better able to automate bureaucracies, we could ensure that power rests with a democratic process that controls X rather than with the bureaucrats who implement X (and could potentially address concerns with privacy). We could potentially reduce overhead for some artifacts by constructing them in such a way that their destructive power is limited without having to retain physical control. (This would be much easier if we could build powerful AI into advanced artifacts.) And so on. In general, the notion of “tagging” could be quite amorphous and subtle.
If we implemented some kind of tagging, then a would-be attacker’s situation in the future is not much better than it is today. They could attempt to develop advanced technology in parallel; if they did that without the use of other advanced artifacts then it would require the same kind of coordination that is currently beyond the ability of terrorist groups. If they did it with the use of tagged advanced artifacts, then their products would end up getting tagged.
FYI, here’s a past Paul Christiano exploration of this topic: