The Summit’s effort to quickly raise the safety issues of rapid AI progress to an international level (outside the United Nation’s Efforts) appears regressive because it is trying to bootstrap a coalition versus relying on pre-existing, extra-national institutions.
Why not work through an established, international venue that includes all nations and thus all political representations on earth?
A UN Security Council Resolution to treat increasingly powerful artificial intelligence structures as a threat to all humans, and thus all represented nations, would be the most direct and comprehensive way to effect a ban. As an institution formed to address the territorial integrity and sovereignty of all nations, the UN is pre-aligned with saving humanity from AI. Perhaps this is a parallel route that can be pursued.
The historical precedent most closely relating to this moment in time is likely the development of nuclear power, and the development of the International Atomic Energy Agency to regulate, hold inspections to verify, etc. Granted, the IAEA has not been very successful at least since the early 1990s, but fixing and aligning those processes/regimes that could otherwise lead to human extinction—including both nuclear power and artificial intelligence, have precedence in institutions that could be revived. This is better than trying to bootstrap AI safety with a handful of countries at a Summit event—even if China is there. North Korea, Russia, and others are not in the room.
As for God’s Joke—there is definitely another way to interpret this detail than the author provides.
The article refers to the adoption of the “even tempered scale” where each note is tuned slightly imperfectly in order to create conditions to play mostly in tune during music that involves multiple key changes; however, it is possible to tune instruments in a more precise manner, including the piano so that they are perfectly in tune for a certain piece of music written in a certain key or with few or no key changes. This kind of piano tuning is called “just intonation.”
So, the piano or any other instrument could be more precisely tuned so that music in a certain key sounds even better than it would on instruments tuned to a tempered scale. There is the potential for a story of greater perfection inside a story of seeking greater precision. Instead of taking this tack, the author refers to it as a kind of joke, invoking God’s sense of humor, whereas this is actually an artifact of human ingenuity. Beginning in the 18th century, western musicians decided, “yeah, this kind of tuning is good enough” given the trade off of listening to a concert and music that includes the effect of key changes or tuning instruments for every key that the group plays in.
(Look up “truck stop key change” for even more fun and insights.)