Matthew I think you're missing a pretty important consideration here, which is that all of these policy/governance actions did not "just happen" -- a huge amount of effort has been put into them, much of it by the extended AI safety community, without which I think we would be in a very different situation. So I take almost the opposite lesson from what's happening: concerted effort to actually try to govern AI might actually succeed -- but we should be doubling down on what we are doing right and learning from what we are doing wrong, not being complacent.
To test this claim we could look to China, where AI x-risk concerns are less popular and influential. China passed a regulation on deepfakes in January 2022 and one on recommendation algorithms in March 2022. This year, they passed a regulation on generative AI which requires evaluation of training data and red teaming of model outputs. Perhaps this final measure was the result of listening to ARC and other AI safety folks who popularized model evaluations, but more likely, it seems that red teaming and evaluations are the common sense way for a government...
Strong agree to this, and I’d go further — I think most of the wins from the last few months wouldn’t have happened if not for the efforts of people in the AI safety ecosystem; and as lobbying efforts from those opposed to regulation heat up, we’ll need even more people advocating for this stuff.
I agree we should not be complacent. I think there's a difference between being complacent and moving our focus to problems that are least likely to be solved by default. My primary message here is that we should re-evaluate which problems need concerted effort now, and potentially move resources to different parts of the problem -- or different problems entirely -- after we have reassessed. I am asking people to raise the bar for what counts as "concerted effort to actually try to govern AI", which I think pushes against some types of blanket advocacy that merely raise awareness, and some proposals that (in my opinion) lack nuance.
(comment crossposted from EA forum)
Very interesting post! But I'd like to push back. The important things about a pause, as envisaged in the FLI letter, for example, are that (a) it actually happens, and (b) the pause is not lifted until there is affirmative demonstration that the risk is lifted. The FLI pause call was not, in my view, on the basis of any particular capability or risk, but because of the out-of-control race to do larger giant scaling experiments without any reasonable safety assurances. This pause should still happen, and it should not be...
If anyone would like to be funded to do actual high quality research on this topic, I strongly encourage application to FLI's Humanitarian Impacts of Nuclear War grant program. For decades there have been barely any careful studies because there is barely any research funding or support. It's quite possible the effects are not as bad as currently predicted, but it's quite possible they are worse — the modern nuclear winter studies fund that things are worse than the early ones in the 80s (though fortunately the arsenals are much smaller now.)
It seems qui...
I think this depends a lot on the use case. I envision for the most part this would be used in/on large known clusters of computation, as an independent check on computation usage and a failsafe. In that case it will be pretty easy to distinguish from other uses like gaming or cryptocurrency mining. If we're in the regime where we're worried about sneaky efforts to assemble lots of GPUs under the radar and do ML with them, then I'd expect there would be pattern analysis methods that could be used as you suggest, or the system could be set up to feed back more information than just computation usage.
The purpose of the COMPUTE token and blockchain here would be to provide a publicly verifiable ledger of the computation done by the computational cores. It would not be integral to the scheme but would be useful for separating the monitoring and control, as detailed in the post. I hope it is clear that a token as a tradeable asset is not at all important to the core idea.
Very cool, thanks for the pointer!
There's no single metric or score that is going to capture everything. Metaculus points as the central platform metric were devised to —as danohu says — reward both participation and accuracy. Both are quite important. It's easy to get a terrific Brier score by cherry-picking questions. (Pick 100 questions that you think have 1% or 99% probability. You'll get a few wrong but your mean Brier score will be ~(few)*0.01. Log score is less susceptible to this). You can also get a fair number of points for just predicting the community prediction — but yo...
I am not an expert on the Outer Space Treaty either, but by also by anecdotal evidence, I have always heard it to be of considerable benefit and a remarkable achievement of diplomatic foresight during the Cold War. However, I would welcome any published criticisms of the Outer Space Treaty you wish to provide.
It's important to note that the treaty was originally ratified in 1967 (as in, ~two years before landing on the Moon, ~5 years after the Cuban Missile Crisis). If you critique a policy for its effects long after its original passage (as with referenc...
your critique is really about the government(s) failing to update and revise the policy, not with the enactment of original policy.
This feels like a really weird statement to me. It is highly predictably that as soon as a law is in place, that there is an incentive to use it for rent-seeking, and that abolishing a policy is reliably much harder than enacting a new policy. When putting in place legislation, the effects of your actions that I will hold you responsible for of course include the highly predictably problems that will occur when your legislation will not have been updated and revised in a long time. That's one of the biggest limitations of legislation as a tool for solving problems!
You're certainly entitled to your (by conventional standards) pretty extreme anti-regulatory view of e.g. the FDA, IRBs, environmental regulations, etc., and to your prior that regulations are in general highly net negative. I don't share those views but I think we can probably agree that there are regulations (like seatbelts, those governing CFCs, asbestos, leaded gasoline, etc.) that are highly net positive, and others (e.g. criminalization of some drugs, anti-cryptography, industry protections against class action suits, etc.) that are nearly completel...
the space treaty
It's been a while since I looked into this, but if I remember correctly the space treaty is currently a major obstacle to industrializing space, due to making mostly impossible to have almost any form of private property of asteroids, or the moon, or other planets, and creating a large fraction of regulatory ambiguity and uncertainty for anyone wanting to work in this space.
When I talked to legal experts in the space for an investigation I ran for FHI 3-4 years ago, my sense was that the space treaty was a giant mess, nobody knew what...
"Regulation," in the sense of a government limitation on otherwise "free" industry does indeed make a bit more sense, and you're certainly entitled to the view that many pieces of regulation of the free market are net negative — though again I think it is quite nuanced, as in many cases (DMCA would be one) regulation allows more free markets that might not otherwise exist.
In this case, though, I think the more relevant reference class is "international arms control agreements" like the bioweapons convention, the convention on conventional weapons, the spac...
Thanks Oliver for this, which likewise very much helps me understand better where some of the ideological disagreements lie. Your statement “but then again, the vast majority of policy passed is strongly net-negative” encapsulates it well. Leaving aside that (even if we could agree on what “positive” and “negative” were) this seems almost impossible to evaluate, it indicates a view that the absence of a policy on something is “no policy”. Whereas in my view in the vast majority of situations the absence of some policy is some other policy, whether it’s ...
If the above seemed confusing, just replace “policy” with “regulation” and my point doesn’t change very much. I feel like it’s not that hard to reliably identify worlds with more vs. less government regulation. I agree that in some abstract sense “there is always a policy”, but I am pointing to a much more concrete effect, which is that most passed regulation seems net-negative to me, whether national or international.
I think it’s very reasonable to try to influence and change regulation that will be passed anyways, but it seems that FLI is lobbying ...
I'd say you are summarizing at least part of the reasoning as I see it, but I'd add that AWs in general seem likely to significantly increase the number of conflicts and the risk of escalation into a full-scale war (very likely to then go nuclear).
I'm not sure what basis there is for thinking that there is some level of "finite supply" of goodwill toward international agreements. Indeed my intuition would be that more international agreements set precedent and mechanisms for more others, in more of a virtuous than self-limiting cycle. If I had to choose ...
But in trying to figure out what might work, actually interesting solutions may well arise.
Hmm, this feels like it highlights some problem I have with FLI's work in this domain. As you seem to agree with here, it's pretty plausible that there is no legislation that is particularly useful in this space, because legislation is really heavily limited by how complicated and nuanced it can be, and heavily constrained by how robust to rules-lawyering it has to be, and so it's pretty plausible to me that all legislation in this space is a bad idea.
But both ...
As with chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons, it will/would be difficult to forestall determined people from getting their hands on them indefinitely — and probably more difficult than any of those cases since there's indeed lots of dual use from drones, and you won't (probably) fear for your life in building one.
Nonetheless I think there is a huge difference between weapons built by amateurs (and even by militaries in secret) versus an open and potential arms-race effort by major military powers. No amateur is going to create a drone WMD, and we can hope that at some level nation-state level anti-AW defenses can keep up with a much less determined program of AW development.
Thanks for your comment. In terms of technical AI safety, I think an interesting research question is the dynamics of multiple adversarial agents — i.e. is there a way to square the need for predicability and control with the need for a system to be unexploitable by an adversary, or are these in hopeless tension? This is relevant for AWs, but seems to also potentially be quite relevant for any multipolar AI world with strongly competitive dynamics.
To answer your research question, in much the same way that in computer security any non-understood behavior of the system which violates our beliefs about how it's supposed to work is a "bug" and very likely en route to an exploit - in the same way that OpenBSD treats every crash as a security problem, because the system is not supposed to crash and therefore any crash proves that our beliefs about the system are false and therefore our beliefs about its security may also be false because its behavior is not known - in AI safety, you would expect system s...
Thanks for this great piece! A few thoughts with my Metaculus hat on:
Great article Garrison!
Bravo.