Basically: only good guys follow laws. A rule that says: "no self defense/no AI" means, in practice: only bad actors can have weapons/AI.
This seems like a bad policy. AI genie isn't going back in the bottle, so to speak.
Training an AI model is easier to do with off the shelf supplies than building a nuke, but it's not necessarily true that some of the worst dystopian results of AI people are afraid of are equally likely to arise from random smaller private interests vs giant corporations or government. An AI directly plugged into the systems that control the nukes is far scarier than an equally powerful model on your home computer.
(I think this particular pause talk is largely silly, though.)
And both are radically different than AI.
> It’s not “only good guys have nukes” but everyone seems to prefer “only certain governments have nukes” to “both good guys and bad guys have nukes.”
And yet, even with willingness to wage wars to contain nuclear proliferation, net proliferation continues. And that’s despite the infrastructure and materials being more obvious and less shared with diverse non-problem uses than the infrastructure and raw materials for AI. There’s no way to have an AI non-proliferation regime. It can’t be done, short of conquering the world with a single, massively authoritarian, totalitarian regime (and then, it still can’t be done, because while the first generation of leaders might be AI true believers, we know from the history of authoritarian regimes that that can’t long be guaranteed, so eventually you’ll have a global authoritarian regime with no counterbalancing force that decides to use AI for itself while keeping it out of the hands of its citizens.)
We pass a law saying: "You cannot have P."
Only people who follow laws will not have P.
We pass a law saying: "You cannot have P."
The market incentive for producing P is now vastly reduced, because the black market is a fraction of the size of the real market, so P never gets built in the first place because it takes a lot of investment and expense to do so.
This is basically doing all of the work in your comment.
I don't agree that AI in malevolent hands carries a risk that is equal to AI in neutral of good hands.
More nations have nukes than they used to, but far fewer than have guns. Life is lived in a gray area that the "not everyone will follow the law therefore the law is useless" mindset somehow ignores.
And if "P" is "an AI that controls weapons deployed/used in the US," say, then enforcement is likely to be more effective than just "nobody can have AI at all."
So it's probably worth thinking about what specific things we do and don't want AI to be used for, and which of those are more or less practical.
EDIT: oh, and it also assumes that P is something people want for itself, vs "if they're gonna do it I better do it too" or "it's 10% cheaper and the externalities don't directly effect me THAT much" or other similar behaviors that can emerge without regulation. Banning leaded paint and leaded gas vs banning alcohol, say.
None of the most recent entrants to the nuke club did so on their own. China got help from Russia while Pakistan, Iran, and North Korea gained it via Abdul Qadeer Khan's URENCO espionage.
It'll be interesting to see if AI will see the same kind of limitation. If so, then maybe there will be some chance at limiting a catastrophic spread.
nuclear proliferation controls have also been relatively successful
Completely agree with you here, the AI genie is out of the bottle so let's just go full speed ahead and see what happens. I mean, what's the worst a super-human AGI can do lol?