I can't see how one could do the regulating of AI but I don't think one can limit the worry-area to "clear and obvious" situations.
Which is fine; engineers are not divine beings. They can have their figurative value deflated like everyone else is these days. Engineered devices have killed a lot of people.
Name three. There are 50,000 gun related deaths in the United States per year, are any of them a bigger threat than gun violence? I struggle to find a single thing AI can do, sans being hooked up to nuclear weapons and time travelling robots with german accents, that's even imaginatively more dangerous than what this country already allows and decides doesn't require useful regulations.
I'm sorry if that's too political for HN but you know what, it actually does matter to compare real dangers (car accidents, gun violence) to conceived and made up ones (gender indifferent bathrooms, AI) when deciding how governments should prioritize policy and regulations.
> I struggle to find a single thing AI can do
How about job loss? If AI can do what proponents say, then it's easy to see that a large amount of job loss will result. If even 20% of people can no longer earn a living, people will die.
This is called creative destruction, and it's not even remotely a new problem created by this particular technology, it's a constant and ongoing mechanism of market capitalism by which technology streamlines or improves something that then requires less labor to accomplish.
When the 400k+ telephone switch operators lost their jobs to digitization, it didn't cause a mass die off of humans, and while I won't say it was a zero bad consequences event, they mostly found other work, work that was probably more interesting and more productive. We certainly could have regulated telephone digitization to prevent this "danger" and instead employed 4.5 million people, or about 3 percent of the labor force, to operate the phone network today as it would have existed technologically in the 1970s, but I'm happy we skipped the scare mongering and went the digitization route, which probably also was a prerequisite for the internet to be able to be used by.. users (which mostly used digital phone services via modems to connect). Would even consumer internet access exist today if they decided to regulate the "danger" of losing analog phone operator jobs?
Either way, I fail to see how allowing only licensed and government regulated companies to work on machine learning will do anything to improve anyone's job prospects moving forward, as increasingly onerous requirements created by people that like to say things like "the internet is a bunch of tubes" make it so only a few rent-seeking monopolies will be able to do anything (legally) with the technology.
I'm not 100% against government regulation, but it's early, things are relatively benign so far (sans self driving cars), let's wait until there's some actual non-sci-fi concerns that emerge and then tackle them as specific things to regulate, rather than wrapping the whole thing into a giant regulatory framework that incorrectly calls it AI before we even learn what the problems are going to be.
True. But this technology (again, if the proponents are correct) threatens to do it on a truly unprecedented scale. It was bad enough -- barely tolerable in some cases -- in history. Getting it even worse seems like something nobody would want, let alone cheerlead.
I am deeply, deeply concerned that there are people willing to gamble with the lives of innocent others (not to mention society itself) like this. It's something we need to be addressing now, before it happens.
It remains to be seen if this is ultimately a real problem. If it turns out that it is, then not regulating the development of these systems in advance may be a huge mistake.
If there's a possibility of an asteroid coming that will wipe out life on earth, waiting until our telescopes can see it to start taking action may not give us enough time to react. We have to plan for the theoretical possibility.
Maybe we'll never be able to create artificial superintelligence. Maybe artificial superintelligence will be much easier to align than we thing. Maybe it'll be hard, but manageable, possibly because we have more time to work on the problem than we think.
All of those are possibilities, but the fact that if you ask 100 people about it, you'll get 100 different opinions, means that we have very little idea how things will go. Given that, I don't like the approach of wing it / hope for the best. If we end up stifling AI innovation unnecessarily, that may mean that our techno-utopia is delayed for a few years, but we get there in the end. On the other hand, if we under-react and things turn out really bad, we may not get another try. Scenarios where AGI kills a billion people are really bad, but scenarios where we create it and end up permanently disempowered or dead are worse.
I wonder sometimes if people are just really dissatisfied with their lives, that they react with such vitriol to the idea of AI progress being delayed. I know we have a lot of problems, but how many of them are technological vs. having poor human institutions and incentive structures? AI probably won't help much with that.
How would we even know what to do until we have a concrete target?
I think it's true that it may be very difficult to solve alignment theoretically, and solving it when we have real-world systems to look at may make it easier (but still probably not easy). But we need to be able to buy companies time so they can slow down as we approach what seems to be the "edge" of dangerous capability / consciousness / goal directedness, without feeling like they will lose out. And to be very strict about the conditions the models are trained under and what testing they undergo before release.
A lot of this is stuff that people are already suggesting, but not everyone is taking the risk seriously.
We are not bothering to regulate AI controlling a 3500lb death machine that goes from 0 to 60 in 2 seconds but we are worried about the dangers of a chatbot.
So typical of our society to be captured by the more compelling narrative and ignore actual reality.
This is what I find so hilariously suspicious about Elon Musk's sudden anxiety about the dangers of AI chatbots. Like, dude, you've spent the better part of two decades making cars that drive themselves and have _already_ killed people with their faulty, ironically oversold "AI." Now all of a sudden someone else's AI, which isn't in the drivers seat of vehicles capable of 100mph+ speeds, and which actually works, is an existential danger to humanity?
But sure, most of the concern about AI is about stuff people imagine happening in the future. So the question is whether future safety concerns are worrisome enough to want to get a head start on regulation.
Also, it’s not just deaths. Generative AI is, among other things, potentially an unlimited supply of disgusting imagery. That’s likely to be a big legal headache for lots of organizations.