This is because almost no law is perfectly enforced. My standard example of this is heroin, which nobody defends even if they otherwise think drugs are great, for which the UK has 3 times as many users as its current entire prison population. Despite that failing, the law probably does limit the harm.
Any attempt to enforce a ban on GenAI would by very different, like a cat and mouse game of automatic detection and improved creation (so a GAN even if accidentally), but politicians are absolutely the kind to take credit while kicking the can down the road like that.
Ban leads to a black market, leads to lousy purity, which leads to fluctuations in purity and switches to potent alternatives, leads to waves of overdose deaths.
So yeah, banning LLMs may turn out to be not so wise after all.
Heroin already is openly accessible. As much as one can try to argue this is an accessibility issue, it really isn't. Anyone who is motivated to can get their hands on some heroin. The only thing that's made harder to access is high quality heroin. It's only a quality control and outreach(to addicts) issue.
Most people in a well-functioning society wouldn't develop a heroin addiction just like most people don't become alcoholics just because alcohol is easily available.
So yes, I believe heroin should be legal, and available to adults for purchase. And you're gonna have to do better than saying I'm "out of my mind" to convince me otherwise.
You'd see a massive increase in heroin use if it was fully legal. And that's not a good thing jn any possible way.
Do you think heroin is more or less commonly used than tabacco or alcohol?
We've already seen from the opioid epidemic that drug companies at least are both willing and able to push massive amounts of an opioid drug on patients if it is even slightly legal to do so. Why do you think it wouldn't be much much worse if it was fully legal?
Note, I am not against decriminalizing heroin and any other drug. I fully agree that the war on drugs is a massive problem. But that doesn't mean that full legalization of hard drugs, especially the most addictive of them, is the same.
Certainly not advocating doing anything the way the US does it, in almost any respect. But the pharma thing is fundamentally a different issue. The reason people so easily become addicted to painkillers is because they're initially given for pain by someone they trust, while unbeknownst to them they've actually been given too much, for too long. In other words this is an issue of doctors abusing their authority.
Why don't I think it would get worse? Because of cultural norms. Legalising heroin won't make it cool and socially acceptable to use. People don't actually derive their social values solely from what happens to be legal.
Let me ask you a question. Why isn't everyone an alcoholic or a smoker? Why do they become rarer(in the west) despite those drugs being legal?
(Hint: the reason is cultural).
If you're for making it fully legal but heavily regulated, somewhat akin to a prescription drug, then I more or less agree.
https://www.jrf.org.uk/prescribing-heroin-what-is-the-eviden....
My elevator-pitch-summary understanding of UK drugs laws is that almost anything can be prescribed by a doctor, but almost everything is illegal unless a doctor does so, and there's 3 levels of severity if you have or supply something without that authorisation.
I guess you could always move to a desert island and build your own semiconductor fab from scratch if you were really committed to the goal, but short of that you're going to leave a loooooong paper trail that someone who wants to make a quick buck off of you could use very profitably. It's hard to advance the state of the art on your own, and even harder to keep that work hidden.
Or one could use honey instead of vinegar: Offer a fast track to US citizenship to any proven AI expert who agrees to move and renounce the trade for good. Personally I think this goal is much more likely to work.
It's all about changing what counts as "cooperate" in the game theory.
Publicly. Then possibly work for the NSA/CIA instead.
> ... bounties ... on people who are not US citizens.
Because that's not going to cause an uproar if done unilaterally.
It works for people that most of the world agree are terrorists. Posting open dead-or-alive bounties on foreign citizens is usually considered an act of terrorism.
Incentivizing people to become AI experts as a means to US citizenship.
Too high and you end up with more experts who then decide "actually it's more beneficial to use my new skills for AI research"
Tricky to get right.
Yes, obviously. They may be working on it to some extent, but they are yet to actually develop a nuclear weapon, and there is no reason to be certain they will one day build one.
Also, there is another research area that has been successfully banned across the world: human cloning. Some quack claims notwithstanding, it's not being researched anywhere in the world.
If you banned proprietary software, this would seem a lot more practical.