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Comment by _cjse | Hacker News Reader

If you lower the problem to "stop people from future developments on AI", then it seems pretty easy to get most people to stop fairly quickly by implementing a fine-based bounty system, similar to what many countries use for things like littering. [url-redacted]

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.

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That only works if all governments cooperate sincerely to this goal. Not gonna work. Everyone will develop in secret. Have we been able to stop North Korea and Iran from developing nuclear weapons? Or any motivated country for that matter.

The US could unilaterally impose this by allowing the bounties to be charged even on people who aren't US citizens. Evil people do exist in the world, who would be happy to get in on that action.

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.

This could have a counter-intuitive impact.

Incentivizing people to become AI experts as a means to US citizenship.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive

Maybe. I'm not very concerned from an x-risk point of view about the output of people who would put in the minimum amount of effort to get on the radar, get offered the deal, then take it immediately and never work in AI again. This would be a good argument to keep the bar for getting the deal offered (and getting fined once you're in the States) pretty low.

If you make the bar too low, then it will be widely exploited. Also harder to enforce, e.g. how closely are you going to monitor them? The more people, the more onerous. Also, can you un-Citizen someone if they break the deal?

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.

There's an asymmetry here: Setting the bar "too low" likely means the United States lets a few thousand more computer scientists emigrate than it would otherwise. Setting the bar too high raises the chances of a rogue paperclip maximizer emerging and killing us all.

> ... move [to the US] and renounce the trade for good ...

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.

> Have we been able to stop North Korea and Iran from developing nuclear weapons?

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.

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