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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022

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First volley in the AI culture war? The EU’s attempt to regulate open-source AI is counterproductive

The regulation of general-purpose AI (GPAI) is currently being debated by the European Union’s legislative bodies as they work on the Artificial Intelligence Act (AIA). One proposed change from the Council of the EU (the Council) would take the unusual, and harmful, step of regulating open-source GPAI. While intended to enable the safer use of these tools, the proposal would create legal liability for open-source GPAI models, undermining their development. This could further concentrate power over the future of AI in large technology companies and prevent research that is critical to the public’s understanding of AI.

The definition of "GPAI" is vague and unclear, but it may possibly differ from the commonly-understood usage of "AGI" and may include systems like GPT-3 and SD.

I will be very curious to see how much mainstream political traction these issues get in the coming years and what the left/right divide on the issue will look like.

As @arjin_ferman observes, this is in line with my more pessimistic scenarios. What is AGI, people ask? Why don't they just click the link? But to be fair, it took me a little while to discover the actual definition, here («WITH PRAGMATISM AGAINST POPULISM & STAGNATION», lmao):

'general purpose AI system' means an AI system that - irrespective of the modality in which it is placed on the market or put into service, including as open source software - is intended by the provider to perform generally applicable functions such as image and speech recognition, audio and video generation, pattern detection, question answering, translation and others; a general purpose AI system may be used in a plurality of contexts and be integrated in a plurality of other AI systems;

It's trivial to realize how this applies to large language models like the GPT series, to say nothing of multimodal systems. We don't have to get even to GATO sorts of multitask training. If anyone thought the cooling effect will only start close to what we intuitively recognize as human performance: think again.

I advise people to notice how synchronized the push against individual agency enhancement is, and it's not, contra the insistence of quokka-economists, explained by innocuous market reasons like economies of scale and data moats. In the US, you have the EA movement with their longtermism, fearmongering, advocacy for «compute governance» and «pivotal acts», and independently from that – politicized corporate AI safety/fairness divisions that'll probably be used to distinguish «responsible actors» and delegitimize smaller ones on the next legislation cycle (like with Oscars: not everyone can afford the demanded diversity package). In the EU, you have this regulation circus building on pop of earlier anti-American big tech rackets masquerading as customer protection. Of course Bostrom's hand is traceable to both sides of the pond, via WEF in the Old World and LW cluster in the New. In Russia... well, if we'll have Russia still on the map in two years, they'll do good if they don't start burning their remaining ML talent for witchcraft; they're also shut out of international markets and can't acquire new compute. Japan is «LOL», as @gwern (not with us I assume) puts it – they don't do any AI R&D worth mentioning, aren't sovereign, and will meekly follow Western lead. In China, as gwern again points out, the newest American export regulations will increase the relative (although not absolute) capacity of central government and big tech, which are already paranoid and illiberal to the highest degree:

The second-order effects here would seem to confirm Chinese autarky and trends towards secrecy, and further, to shift power from Chinese academia/small businesses/hobbyists/general-public to Chinese bigtech and thus, the Chinese government. If you've been following along, the big megacorps, especially in the wake of the attempted US execution of Huawei, have been developing their own DL ASICs for a while with an eye towards exactly this sort of scenario. [...]

If you are rich and well-connected and can finance the lobbying and guanxi and paperwork, you'll be able to get access to compute, one way or another, while the small guys can no longer click 'buy' on nvidia.com or just negotiate their usual datacenter orders and will pay higher costs or go without. It's the same reason why things like GDPR always wind up hurting FANG less than the activists expect (and hurt small actors like NGOs or startups much more), why 'regulatory capture' exists and why big actors often actively lobby for more regulation. It's going to be much harder and more expensive to get Nvidia GPUs or to get proprietary hardware (can you buy a TPU from Google? no, you cannot), therefore, small actors like hobbyists will be systematically disadvantaged and many priced out.

The rest of the world (sorry fellow rest-of-worlders) is comprised of some shades of shithole and Western cryptocolony, wracked by climate disasters, brain drain and, crucially, global economic crisis triggered in no small part by the EU/American/Chinese COVID policies and now the war, extremely vulnerable even to half-hearted sanctions, and won't have the wherewithal to do ML research at scale.

Well, there are exceptions of course, hilariously two exceptions validating priors of Russian conspiracy nuts.

One is a dystopian surveillance state with legendary intelligence services and diplomatic acumen, a history of attempting and partially pulling off ludicrously illiberal tech regulations, but not (yet) any de facto obstruction on advanced AI research for smaller actors; the island where core DeepMind staff is physically located, and Stability.AI incorporated.

The other is a militarized ethnostate with infamously capable intelligence agencies, world-class lithography fabs, world-leading STEM&software talent, brazenly self-interested and defiant of international regulations, not beholden to NATO or really any other alliance, with a good track record in clandestine WMD development and non-signing of non-proliferation treaties and their equivalents.

So: USA, UK, Israel, maaaybe China if (and that's a big if) it doesn't immolate itself with its own bureaucracy and Special Military Operation in a few years. These three and a half – more like one and a half – actors will split the future of the light cone, the way it's going.

That's to be expected of course. Individual agency is a threat to big structures, always has been. Even allowing escape is a threat, an infinitely big threat when multiplied by longtermist numbers and existential anxiety. There used to be a great Motte-adjacent blog, 451somethingsomething, a few years ago, with a good article of the alienation the author felt when he noticed the vibe of eusociality and hivemindedness in the society around him, his own obsolescence as a stubborn independent cell. Not edgy, just desperate. That's kind of how I feel now.

There used to be a great Motte-adjacent blog, 451somethingsomething, a few years ago, with a good article of the alienation the author felt when he noticed the vibe of eusociality and hivemindedness in the society around him, his own obsolescence as a stubborn independent cell.

Status451? That guy who wrote the book review on Days of Rage?

Right, Ghosts in Every Machine

Last month was strange and horrifying. A guy with an interesting and novel project wanted to talk about it at a conference. A conference run by a solid, upstanding tech leader. And then everyone lost their shit. Suddenly, out of nowhere, everything was crazy. All I wanted to do was protect a conference I’ve enjoyed in the past, to do a nice thing for a guy who made a mistake in the eyes of the public. The next thing I know, I’m surrounded by zombies. News reporters made up lies about us. Communists on the internet joked (haha-no-but-really) about sending us to gulags. Coworkers of mine, not knowing who I am, told me to my face about this “crazy blog defending a horrible bigot,” and how they’re glad there aren’t any terrible people like that in our office. I’ll be laughing for a long time about how I’m officially certified “not supremacist” by the SPLC.

This is insanity. Why did these people do these strange things? Why did people I knew and trusted, interacted with daily, turn into horrible people yelling for my head? The most confusing part was their general ignorance of the details of the situation. Very few of them knew why they should be upset. None of them had ever read the speaker’s offending blog, and few of them had so much as seen the offending quotation. All they knew was that we’re the bad guys, and need to be punished.

Our critics are a part of something bigger than themselves. They’re keyed in to the Waze app, being the human serpents, while my Motorola flip-phone struggles to run the snake game. And why wouldn’t they? At every step along the way, it makes sense. Who cares why the narrative seems a little too perfect, they’re happy. It works for them. Their needs are met. By playing their part, responding to the signals in the memetwork, they enjoy health and happiness, wealth and social status. It would be stupid not to go along.

We here at Status451 have never really fit in. The signals are mangled by the mountains here in Zomia. We’re the single cells. The behaviours of everyone else made no sense to us, and the results were frightening. We can’t see the complex internal signals.

When the mass of cells is bearing down on you, just like in Simon-spore, you do have an option. You have mobility. Freedom. Our critics, keyed into the signal of their culture war narrative, gain a lot of benefits. They get their social needs provided for, in exchange for being the lifeblood of their egregore. But that is the cost: they must be the egregore. They lose the freedom to go their own way. We here have chosen the other path. Maybe “chosen” isn’t quite the right word; I’ve tried my whole life to fit in, be normal, and it just doesn’t work. But our other path, chosen or not, gives us the freedom to see things differently. We can be the masters of our own fate, hold a deeper, fuller agency over our lives. As long as we don’t wake the deep faceless things.