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Republicans are looking to militarize and ramp up AI: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/07/16/trump-ai-executive-order-regulations-military/
This is only a draft plan and not official policy but it does seem like decades of EA/lesswrong philosophizing and NGO shenanigans have been swept away by the Aschenbrenner 'speed up and beat China to the finish line' camp. I think that's what most people expected, the fruits are simply too juicy for anyone to resist feasting upon them. It also fits with the general consensus of big tech which is ploughing money into AI at great speeds. The Manhattan Project cost about $20 billion inflation adjusted, Microsoft is spending about $50 billion a year on capex, much of it going into AI data centres. That's a lot of money!
However, there is a distinction between AGI/superintelligence research and more conventional military usage: guiding missiles and drones, cyberwarfare, improving communications. China has been making advances there, I recall that they had datasets of US navy ships circulating. One of their most important goals is getting their anti-ship ballistic missiles to hit a moving, evading ship. It's hard to guide long-range missiles precisely against a strong opponent that can jam GPS/Beidou. AI-assisted visual targeting for the last adjustments is one potential answer.
The Chinese and US militaries may not be fully AGI-pilled but they're very likely enthusiastic about enhancing their conventional weapons. Modern high-end warfare is increasingly software-dependant, it becomes a struggle between the radar software and the ECM software, satellite recognition vs camouflage. If you have some esoteric piece of software that can make it easier to get a missile lock on a stealth fighter, that's a major advantage. While most attention is focused on text and image generation, the same broad compute-centric techniques could be used for radar or IR, seismology, astronomy...
On the cultural front J D Vance has highlighted the danger of big tech companies calling for safety regulations and securing their incumbents advantage: https://x.com/BasedBeffJezos/status/1812981496183201889
I also think Google's floundering around with black Vikings in their image-generation and other political AI bias has roused Republicans and right-wingers into alarm. They don't particularly want to get their enemies entrenched in control of another media format. AI may be a special format in that it's much more obvious and clear in how the propaganda system works. A real person can avoid gotcha questions or moderate their revealed opinions tactically. Most teachers do that in school, they can convey an attitude without providing gotcha moments for libsoftiktok (though some certainly do). With AI you can continually ask it all kinds of questions to try and make it slip up and reveal the agenda behind it.
Crap. Hope they reverse course; it's not actually that unlikely given the politics of Big Tech. I'd appreciate an offramp less horrific than "WWIII destroys half the hardware and fucks everything with soft errors" and less dangerous than "we get live rogue AI".
The LLM based systems that exist have problems with basic logical tasks or addition. There's been no demonstrated agents capable of doing anything interesting on their own.
We are as far away from even the possibility of 'live rogue AI' as 1890 people were from supersonic jet bombers. So, sixty years, maybe.
It's an entirely theoretical problem, nothing like the self-improving system Big Yud has been dooming about has even the whiff of reality on it. The only legitimate fear we can have now is that LLM powered bots are going to crap up social media with fake content.
It doesn’t need agency to do something awful, though. Doesn’t even have to be smart. Just stupid, fast, and attached to some real-world effects. Military research is rather interested in attaching such effects.
Nor is “60 years” a refutation of anything Magic said. What happens in the meantime that gets us out of the bind?
What bind? Progress is going to be slow, and between cybercrime, cybercrime augmented with 'dumb' AI systems, everything is going to be hardened to hell by the time there are any actual 'rogue' AIs.
That's my guess of how things will work out.
And in any case, there never was a realistic, good option of stopping dangerous AI, because militaries want 'dangerous' AIs.
If they didn't want them, that'd be entirely horrific - it'd imply planet dominated by a single government and able to puppet everything so nothing ever happens. That's a game-over condition of stasis and decay.
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