Why is there so little mention of the potential role of the military industrial complex in developing AGI rather than a public AI lab? The money is available, the will, the history (ARPANET was the precursor to the internet). I am vaguely aware there isn’t much to suggest the MIC is on the cutting edge of AI-but there wouldn’t be if it were all black budget projects. If that is the case, it presumably implies a very difficult situation because the broader alignment community would have no idea when crucial thresholds were being crossed.
I’m guessing the state of government’s attitude at the moment might be characterized by the recent White House press briefing question, where a reporter, quoting Yudkowsky, asked about concerns that “literally everyone on Earth will die”, and got a reception similar to what you’d expect if he asked about UFOs or bigfoot, just coated in political boilerplate. “But thank you Peter, thank you for the drama,” “On a little more serious topic...” The other journalists were unsuccessfully struggling to restrain their laughter. The Overton window might be getting there, but it’s not there yet, and it’s unclear if it gets there before AGI is deployed.
It’s sad the question didn’t mention the AI Impacts survey result, which I think is the most legible two-sentence argument at the moment.
I should have clarified a bit, I was using the term ‘military industrial complex’ to try to narrow in on the much more technocratic underbelly of the American Defence/Intelligence community or private contractors. I don’t have any special knowledge of the area so forgive me, but essentially DARPA and the like or any agency with a large black budget.
Whatever they are doing does not need to have any connection to whatever the public facing government says in press briefings. It is perfectly possible that right now a priority for some of these agencies is funding a massive AI project, while the WH laughs off AI safety-that is how classified projects work. It illustrates the problem a bit actually, in that the entire system is set up to cover things up for national defence, in which case, having a dialogue about AI Risk is virtually impossible.
Why is there so little mention of the potential role of the military industrial complex in developing AGI rather than a public AI lab? The money is available, the will, the history (ARPANET was the precursor to the internet). I am vaguely aware there isn’t much to suggest the MIC is on the cutting edge of AI-but there wouldn’t be if it were all black budget projects. If that is the case, it presumably implies a very difficult situation because the broader alignment community would have no idea when crucial thresholds were being crossed.
I’m guessing the state of government’s attitude at the moment might be characterized by the recent White House press briefing question, where a reporter, quoting Yudkowsky, asked about concerns that “literally everyone on Earth will die”, and got a reception similar to what you’d expect if he asked about UFOs or bigfoot, just coated in political boilerplate. “But thank you Peter, thank you for the drama,” “On a little more serious topic...” The other journalists were unsuccessfully struggling to restrain their laughter. The Overton window might be getting there, but it’s not there yet, and it’s unclear if it gets there before AGI is deployed.
It’s sad the question didn’t mention the AI Impacts survey result, which I think is the most legible two-sentence argument at the moment.
I should have clarified a bit, I was using the term ‘military industrial complex’ to try to narrow in on the much more technocratic underbelly of the American Defence/Intelligence community or private contractors. I don’t have any special knowledge of the area so forgive me, but essentially DARPA and the like or any agency with a large black budget.
Whatever they are doing does not need to have any connection to whatever the public facing government says in press briefings. It is perfectly possible that right now a priority for some of these agencies is funding a massive AI project, while the WH laughs off AI safety-that is how classified projects work. It illustrates the problem a bit actually, in that the entire system is set up to cover things up for national defence, in which case, having a dialogue about AI Risk is virtually impossible.