If a law is passed saying "AI advancement is illegal" how can it ever be enforced?
> If a law is passed saying "AI advancement is illegal" how can it ever be enforced?
Like any other real-life law? Software engineers (a class which I'm a recovering member of) seem to have a pretty common misunderstanding about the law: that it needs to be air tight like secure software, otherwise it's pointless. That's just not true.
So the way you "prevent advancements in [AI] software" is you 1) punish them severely when detected and 2) restrict access to information and specialized hardware to create a barrier (see: nuclear weapons proliferation, "born secret" facts, CSAM).
#1 is sufficient to control all the important legitimate actors in society (e.g. corporations, university researchers), and #2 creates a big barrier to everyone else who may be tempted to not play by the rules.
It won't be perfect (see: the drug war), but it's not like cartel chemists are top-notch, so it doesn't have to be. I don't think the software engineering equivalent of a cartel chemist will be able to "do cutting edge research and innovate with architectures and algorithms" with only a "laptop and inet connection."
Would the technology disappear? No. Will it be pushed to the margins? Yes. Is that enough? Also yes.
Even if governments overtly agree to stop or pause or otherwise limit machine learning, how credible would such a "gentlemans agreement" be?
Consider the basic operations during training and inference, like matrix multiplication, derivatives, gradient descent. Which of these would be banned? All of them? None of them? Some of them? The combination of them?
How would you inspect compliance in the context of privacy?
The analogy with drugs is rather poor: people don't have general purpose laboratories in their house. People do have general purpose computational platforms in their home. Another is that nations do not prohibit each other from producing drugs, they even permit each other to research and investigate pathogens, chemical weapons in laboratories deemed sufficiently safe.
It's not even clear what you mean with "AI" does it mean all machine learning? or LLM's? Where do you draw this boundary?
What remains is the threat of punishment in your proposal, but how credible is it, wouldn't a small collective of programmers conspiring work on machine learning, predict getting paperclipped in case of arrest?
The problem is that the information can go anywhere that has an internet connection, and the enforcement can't.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Opera
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Natanz_incident
https://www.timesofisrael.com/israel-targeted-secret-nuclear...
If were talking about technology that "could go off the rails in a catastrophic way," don't dick around.
As for the Chinese chip industry, I don't claim to be an expert on it, but it seems the Chinese are quickly coming up with increasingly less inferior alternatives to Western tech.
Perhaps it only takes China a few years to develop domestic hardware clusters rivalling western ones. Though those few years might prove critical in determining who crosses the takeoff threshold of this technology, first.