One big obstacle you didn’t mention: you can make porn with that thing. It’s too late to stop it.
More seriously, I think this cat may already be out of the bag. Even if the scientific community and the american military-industrial complex and the chinese military-industrial complex agreed to stop AI research, existing models and techniques are already widely available on the internet.
Even if there is no official AI lab anywhere doing AI research, you will still have internet communities pooling compute together for their own research projects (especially if crypto collapses and everybody suddenly has a lot of extra compute on their hands).
And these online communities are not going to be open-minded about AI safety concerns. We’ve seen that already with the release of Stable Diffusion 2.0: the internet went absolutely furious that the model was limited in (very limited ways) that impacted performance. People wanted their porn machine to be as good as it could possibly be and had no sympathy whatsoever for the developers’ PR / safety / not-wanting-to-be-complicit-with-nonconsensual-porn-fakes concerns.
Of course, if we do get to the point only decentralized communities do AI research, it will be a pretty big win for the “slowing down” strategy. I get your general point about “we should really exhaust all available options even if we think it’s nigh impossible”. I just think you’re underestimating a bit how nigh-impossible it is. We can barely stop people from using fossil fuels, and that’s with an infinitely higher level of buy-in from decision-makers.
One big obstacle you didn’t mention: you can make porn with that thing. It’s too late to stop it.
More seriously, I think this cat may already be out of the bag. Even if the scientific community and the american military-industrial complex and the chinese military-industrial complex agreed to stop AI research, existing models and techniques are already widely available on the internet.
Even if there is no official AI lab anywhere doing AI research, you will still have internet communities pooling compute together for their own research projects (especially if crypto collapses and everybody suddenly has a lot of extra compute on their hands).
And these online communities are not going to be open-minded about AI safety concerns. We’ve seen that already with the release of Stable Diffusion 2.0: the internet went absolutely furious that the model was limited in (very limited ways) that impacted performance. People wanted their porn machine to be as good as it could possibly be and had no sympathy whatsoever for the developers’ PR / safety / not-wanting-to-be-complicit-with-nonconsensual-porn-fakes concerns.
Of course, if we do get to the point only decentralized communities do AI research, it will be a pretty big win for the “slowing down” strategy. I get your general point about “we should really exhaust all available options even if we think it’s nigh impossible”. I just think you’re underestimating a bit how nigh-impossible it is. We can barely stop people from using fossil fuels, and that’s with an infinitely higher level of buy-in from decision-makers.