Trigger happy regulation for a field that hasn't even come into full swing. It's indicative of an over-active immune system; lawmakers with nothing better to do.
Pass laws against improper use and go after the malicious users. Don't ban the technology, the research, or even the applications. (Of which there will be abundant good uses. Many of which we've yet to even see or predict.)
Our culture has become obsessed with regulating and limiting freedom on the very principle that it might be harmful. We should be punishing actual measurable, physical and monetary harms. Not imaginary or hypothetical ones.
If California passes this, AI companies should leave California behind.
Where is the ban here?
> Other relief as the court deems appropriate, including monetary damages damages, including punitive damages, to persons aggrieved aggrieved, punitive damages, and an order for the full shutdown of a covered model.
> A civil penalty in an amount not exceeding 10 percent of the cost, excluding labor cost, to develop the covered model for a first violation and in an amount not exceeding 30 percent of the cost, excluding labor cost, to develop the covered model for any subsequent violation.
[1] https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...
A better-fitting analogy I'd make is that sex causes disease and other negative externalities, so we should pass laws that force people to be married and licensed in order to have sex.
In any case, this bill is the walking epitome of something a "nanny state" might produce.
[1] TikTok and Instagram have far more impact on this, and we've yet to do anything there. We seem to be of the opinion that this should be an individual responsibility.
Some of us worry that billions of people will be killed by AI in the future -- possibly without anything that you or the average decision-maker might regard as a warning. (They're likely to be killed all at the same time.)
I.e., it is more like a large asteroid slamming into the Earth than a stream of deaths over time such as produced by the deployment in society of the automobile (except that the asteroid does not have the capability of noticing that it's first plan failed to kill a group of human over there, then to devise a second plan for killing those).
Science fiction.
What really gets me concerned is the quality of the writing on the subject of how can we design an AI so that it will not want to hurt us (just as we design bridges so that we know from first principles they won't fall down). Most leaders of AI labs have by now written about the topic, but the writings are shockingly bad: everyone has some explanation as to why the AI will turn out to be safe, but there are dozens of orthogonal explanations, some very simplistic, none of which I want to bet my life on or the lives of my younger relatives.
Those who do write well about the topic, particularly Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, say that it is probably not currently within the capabilities of any living human or group of humans to design an AI to be safe (to humans) the way we design bridges to be safe, and that our best hope is the hope that over the next centuries humankind will become cognitively capable enough to do and that in the meantime people stop trying to create AIs that might turn out to be dangerously capable -- which (because outside of actually doing the training run, we have no way of predicting the effects on capability of the next architectural improvement or the next increase in computing resources devoted to training) basically means stopping all AI research now worldwide and for good measure stopping progress in GPU technology.
Eliezer has been full-time employed for over 20 years to work on the issue (and Nate has been for about 15 years) and they've had enough funding to employ at least a dozen researchers and researcher-apprentices over that time to bounce ideas off of in the office.
We were similarly ignorant about recombinant DNA, so Asilomar was very cautious about it. Now we know more, we are less cautious. I still think it was good to be cautious and not to dismiss recombinant DNA concerns as "science fiction".
The relevance is IMHO this bill is largely an ossification at the government level of the safety and alignment philosophy of the big corps. I'm guessing they mainly wrote this bill. It's not the specific words "safey and alignment" that matter, it's the philosophy.
If the bill were only covering AI killing machines I'd (probably) be in agreement with it, but it seems significantly more overreaching than that.
No harm done!
>If the bill were only covering AI killing machines I'd (probably) be in agreement with it, but it seems significantly more overreaching than that.
Just to make sure we are on the same page: my main worry is the projects ("deployments"?) that aren't intended to kill anybody, but one of those project ends up killing billions of people anyways. It probably kills absolutely everyone. That one project might be trying to cure cancer.
The only way of not incurring this risk of extinction (and of mass death) that I know of is to shut down all AI research now, which I'm guessing you would consider "overreaching".
It would be great if there were a way to derive the profound benefits of continuing to do AI research without incurring the extinction risk. If you think you have a way to do that, please let me know. If I agree that your approach is promising, I'll drop everything to make sure you get a high-paying job to develop your approach. There are lots of people who would do that (and lots of high-net-worth people and organizations who would pay you the money).
The Machine Intelligence Research Institute for example has a lot of money that was donated to them by cryptocurrency entrepreneurs that they've been holding on to year after year because they cannot think of any good ways to spend it to reduce extinction risk. They'd be eager to give money to anyone that can convince them that they have an approach with even a 1% probability of success.
I guess I need to decide how high I feel the risk is of that, and that I'm less sure of. Appreciate the discussion btw!
I'm not against legislation regulating AI, but it needs to be targeted toward clear problems e.g.: stealing copyrighted material, profiling crime, face recognition, self driving vehicles, automated "targeting" however you want to interpret that.
I want to point out above are some awful uses of AI that are leveraged mostly by closed, proprietary entities
I think they are having to deal with things like sales to countries outside of their legal reach. So, while I understand the tack here, there's probably more to it than this.
Of little concern in the US legal system. Might be problematic in the EU perhaps, but in the United States the courts have consistently been tremendously deferential to the interests of small and large businesses vs consumers.
I guess they are damned if they do and damned if they don't.
We constantly complain about slow lawmaking, "Look at how out of touch Congress are! XYZ technology is moving so fast, and they're always 10-20 years behind!" Finally, someone is actually on the ball and up-to-date with a current technology, and now the other complainers complain that they're jumping the gun and regulating too soon. Lawmakers can't win.
I don't think I've ever complained about slow lawmaking.
I've complained about a lack of rights and a lack of enshrined rights.
In Engineering, "best practices" are the set of "just do X" answers that will let you skip deriving every answer about what material or design to use from first principles for cases where there's a known dominant solution. For example, "for a load-bearing pillar, use steel-reinforced concrete, in a cylindrical shape, with a cross-sectional diameter following formula XYZ given the number of storeys of the building." You can (and eventually must!) still do a load simulation for the building, to see that the pillar can hold things up without cracking — but you don't have to model the building when selecting what material to use; and you don't have to randomly fiddle with the shape or diameter of the pillar until the load holds. You can slap a pillar into the design and be able to predict that it'll hold the load (while not being overly costly in material use!), because "best practices."