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The future of AI is likely decided this week with Sam Altman's Congressional testimony. What do you expect?
EDIT: the recording is here.
Frankly I've tried to do my inadequate part to steer this juggernaut and don't have the energy for an effortpost (and we're having a bit too many of AI ones recently), so just a few remarks:
AI Doom narrative keeps inceasing in intensity, in zero relation to any worrying change in AI «capabilities» (indeed, with things like Claude-100K Context and StarCoder we're steadily progressing towards more useful coding and paperwork assistants at the moment, and not doing much in way of AGI; recent results seem to be negative for the LLM shoggoth/summoned demon hypothesis, which is now being hysterically peddled by e.g. these guys). Not only does Yud appear on popular podcasts and Connor Leahy turns up on MSM, but there's an extremely, conspicuously bad and inarticulate effort by big tech to defend their case. E.g. Microsoft's economist proposes we wait for meaningful harm before deciding on regulations – this is actually very sensible if we treat AI as an ordinary technology exacerbating some extant harms and bringing some benefits, but it's an insane thing to say when the public's imagination has been captured by Yuddist story of deceptive genie, and «meaningful harm» translates to eschatological imagery. Yann LeCun is being obnoxious and seemingly ignorant of the way the wind blows, though he's beginning to see. In all seriousness, top companies had to have prepared PR teams for this scenario.
Anglo-American regulatory regime will probably be more lax than that in China or the Regulatory Superpower (Europeans are, as always, the worst with regard to enterpreneural freedom), but I fear it'll mandate adherence to some onerous checklist like this one (consider this as an extraordinary case of manufacturing consensus – some literally who's «AI policy» guys come up with possible measures, a tiny subset of the queried people, also in the same until-very-recently irrelevant line of work, responds and validates them all; bam, we can say «experts are unanimous»). Same logic as with diversity requirements for Oscars – big corporations will manage it, small players won't; sliding into an indirect «compute governance» regime will be easy after that. On the other hand, MSNBC gives an anti-incumbent spin; but I don't think the regulators will interpret it this way. And direct control of AGI by USG appointees is an even worse scenario.
The USG plays favourites; on the White House meeting where Kamala Harris entered her role of AI Czar, Meta representatives weren't invited, but Anthropic's ones were. Why? How has the safety-oriented Anthropic merited their place among the leading labs, especially in a way that the government can appreciate? I assume the same ceaseless lobbying and coordinating effort that's evident in the FHI pause letter and EU's inane regulations is also active here.
Marcus is an unfathomable figure to me, and an additional cause to suspect foul play. He's unsinkable. To those who've followed the scene at all (more so to Gwern) it is clear that he's an irrelevant impostor – constantly wrong, ridiculously unapologetic, and without a single technical or conceptual result in decades; his greatest AI achievement was selling his fruitless startup to Uber, which presumably worked only because of his already-established reputation as an «expert». Look at him boast: «well-known for his challenges to contemporary AI, anticipating many of the current limitations decades in advance». He's a small man with a big sensitive ego, and I think his ego will be used to perform a convincing grilling of the evil gay billionaire tech bro Altman. Americans love pro wrestling, after all.
Americans also love to do good business. Doomers are, in a sense, living on borrowed time. Bitter academics like Marcus, spiteful artists, scared old people, Yuddites – those are all nothing before the ever-growing legion of normies using GPT-4 to make themselves more productive. Even Congress staff got to play with ChatGPT before deliberating on this matter. Perhaps this helped them see the difference between AI and demons or nuclear weapons. One can hope.
Scott has published a minor note on Paul Ehrlich the other day. Ehrlich is one of the most evil men alive, in my opinion; certainly one of those who are despised far too little, indeed he remains a respectable «expert». He was a doomer of his age, and an advocate for psyops and top-down restrictions of people's capabilities; and Yud is such a doomer of our era, and his acolytes are even more extreme in their advocacy. Both have extracted an inordinate amount of social capital from their doomerism, and received no backlash. I hope the newest crop doesn't get so far with promoting their policies.
This is a big reason I'm uncomfortable using "AI" to describe LLMs and the main applications I envision are basically extremely useful and efficient virtual personal assistants. They're obviously a huge productivity boon but they also don't feel that qualitatively different?
Big Yud likes to cite hypotheticals involving a malicious actor trying to cause as much damage as possible by leveraging LLMs to create a new deadly pathogen or the like. This is essentially the same archetype as mass shooters or terrorists, and the closest parallels are basically 100x versions of the Anarchist Cookbook, bump stock AR-15s from a hotel room, or cargo trucks. I acknowledge these risks are real but the other obvious application for LLMs is that mass government surveillance will get dramatically cheaper and more pervasive. It doesn't seem obvious to me that the boost towards a bad actor's capacity for destruction will outstrip the government's surveillance boon. Has anyone written about this?
Should it? Do we want to live in a world where government capacity decisively outstrips that of individuals, where the authorities really can make people shut up and do as they're told?
If not, how badly do we wish to prevent such a world? If such a world seems to be what we're heading toward, but the balance of power still lies with the public, should the public take steps to forestall the formation of an unrivaled government?
I find it very, very difficult to believe that a future where the government has perfected truly effective, effectively inescapable surveillance is one that I want to live in. There is no plausible route I can imagine where this sort of power doesn't result in mountain-ranges of skulls.
In any case, your 100x multiplier is difficult to assess, mainly because most people aren't thinking about the problem from the right angle. I'm convinced the base threat is significantly underappreciated, and the second- and third-order effects are largely being ignored.
I find it hard to believe that the federal government is capable of building a perfect panopticon in any reasonable timeframe. There are just too many leaky gaps in how info is collected. I imagine that criminals long since abandoned cellphones and facebook for sending business communications, and even chat gpt doesnt know what criminals are up to. What i think will be interesting is when we will see a sort of parallel construction of evidence using AI- the feds could feed their mega cache of comms data into a gpt-esque thing and ask who the likely ne'er do wells are and then go and start busting doors. Presumably, if the input data is solid and the AI isn't seeing rainbows, you could get some hits even if they are mixed in with some misses. Presumably some agency or PD will eventually try this, and presumably at some point it will become a point of evidence in trial that this is happening.
Parallel construction is super illegal. would using an AI be a loophole until further noted? who knows but ultimately its probably a bad decade to be starting up a scarface type situation.
Interestingly, i bet gpt would also be super amazing at figuring out who is dodging taxes, but what with the IRS having only 2 rusty pennies to rub together i doubt this will happen either.
The smart ones have but we mostly catch the dumb ones. I recall one instance where they did a drug deal under a live CCTV camera. Other times, they all switch their phones off at the same time when going out to do some crime. There are also occasional sting programs where they import phones that are supposed to be secured but the game was rigged from the start.
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It doesn't have to be perfect to be almost unimaginably harmful. Removing the bottleneck of human labor in surveillance and analysis is a serious threat to the idea of limited or even responsive government.
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