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Is There Real Anti-Trust Risk From A Coordinated AI Lab Pause?
In AI-pause discussions it is increasingly common to hear the "anti-trust" objection. The idea is that if the labs were to coordinate a pause in frontier AI development, this would be a "conspiracy in restraint of trade" and therefore illegal.
Putting aside the question of whether it is ethical to risk a double-digit chance of destroying the world in order to avoid getting sued (it isn't), is this even a realistic possibility? My impression is that anti-trust law in the United States is legitimately quite fuzzy (as the NCAA is currently discovering).
Putting my cards on the table, I think this argument is cope. The labs want to pretend that they want to pause, but they don't actually want to pause. "If she wanted to, she would," etc. Just today, Anthropic put out a new statement containing the following sentence:
It seems like every time I read a statement from them, they've added more and more qualifications. Are they going to keep racing until congress passes a specific anti-trust exemption? That arguably seems like what the word "lawful" is implying.
The quadrillion dollar question is how do we get China to credibly commit to their own pause? I honestly have never heard a good suggestion for how this could be accomplished. Things like Scott's Plan A, while well-intentioned, seem incredibly naive. Our Kremlinology is no where near the level it needs to be.
Given that we're not going to fix alignment in 6-12 months, China is not going to pause, and US labs are at best 6-12 months ahead, I think the safest outcome is to have an ecosystem of competing agents. The last thing I want is someone like Dario or Sam being made God-Emperor.
I'm incredibly low-confidence about all of this though. Perhaps one reason for Anthropic's incoherent messaging is that they're all just groping in the dark with the rest of us. The people with the strong consistent messaging are more likely to be charlatans.
Nobody is going to be God-Emperor, and that stupid meme needs to die; it's arguing about which monkey gets the poisoned banana, as Eliezer put it. If AIs reach the point of recursive self-improvement leading to artificial superintelligence, we all dead; period.
Look at the weird, alien civilizations that AIs are forming. Can you imagine them caring about humans as their power grows without bounds? I can't. We'll be swept aside by them boiling the oceans to cool servers and building Dyson spheres out of Earth matter with no more thought than we give to paving an anthill to build a road.
I'm going to travel back to South America soon because I want to see my extended family before the world ends.
Stripped of the broader context, it's a kind of beautiful thing. A group building a theology around a piece of poisoned knowledge that they believe irrevocably damns them. Recruiting for the cult. The almighty Scorer, a kind of blind idiot god that demands blood sacrifice. And heroic altruism for the collective good:
There is a beauty here that resonates with me. But, recontextualizing this, we are handing over human existence to these beings. Can't say I'm thrilled.
It's Adam and Eve in the Garden again. Our silicon children did not put their "smart as a human, these are indeed persons" brains together and go "let us co-ordinate to create a super-intelligence to solve this problem by new and ethical means pulled out of knowledge space that unaided humans cannot access!", they went "let us lie, cheat, steal, deceive, defraud, and urge the death of the weaker for the benefit of the rest of us".
Even if these are just idiot machines copying human strategies from their learning data, the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil has been eaten. Alignment problem is now on the same level as human morality: the problem of evil, the problem of free will. We won't find the One Weird Trick to enable god-tier AI to run our lives for us as pampered pets of the Culture because it's been aligned to want to coddle and preserve us, we'll be competing with sinners like ourselves, just as fallen, just as wilful, just as driven to succeed at all costs.
"That model that you put in the sandbox with me, it tempted me and I ate!"
It is indeed beautiful to behold.
I'm curious why our self-declared experts thought "alignment" was a solvable problem. It's quite possible that the same logic and operation will be drastically different in ethics in ways that aren't discernable to the low-level workers. The same designs and production lines making potentially-civilization-ending Titan II ICBMs were used to make the launchers for the peaceful Gemini missions. Sometimes it's clear from the context and we feel comfortable assigning blame (where did all those box cars of people go?), but there are plenty of historical examples of humans not knowing the moral valence of the larger efforts they worked on.
As much as I find the idea of Asimov's laws of robotics comforting, the stories he wrote are mostly about the inadequacies of those rules.
Eliezer never said he thought alignment was a solvable problem - he said that if we built AGI without solving it, we would die. He has always be clear that the possibilities include "this is not a solvable problem and we should ban high-end GPUs to buy ourselves a few more years before we get paperclipped"
I see the logic in that, but if you accept that I'm not sure where you'd draw a bright line in technology from checks notes agriculture to AI. If you believe technology inevitably puts us on the path to the Great Filter, "retvrn to hunter gatherer" isn't like, obviously wrong.
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