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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 25, 2024

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Beijing Pushes for AI Regulation - A campaign to control generative AI raises questions about the future of the industry in China.

China’s internet regulator has announced a campaign to monitor and control generative artificial intelligence. The move comes amid a bout of online spring cleaning targeting content that the government dislikes, as well as Beijing forums with foreign experts on AI regulation. Chinese Premier Li Qiang has also carried out official inspection tours of AI firms and other technology businesses, while promising a looser regulatory regime that seems unlikely. [...]

One of the concerns is that generative AI could produce opinions that are unacceptable to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), such as the Chinese chatbot that was pulled offline after it expressed its opposition to Russia’s war in Ukraine. However, Chinese internet regulation goes beyond the straightforwardly political. There are fears about scams and crime. There is also paternalistic control tied up in the CCP’s vision of society that doesn’t directly target political dissidence—for example, crackdowns on displaying so-called vulgar wealth. Chinese censors are always fighting to de-sexualize streaming content and launching campaigns against overenthusiastic sports fans or celebrity gossip. [...]

The new regulations are particularly concerned about scamming, a problem that has attracted much attention in China in the last two years, thanks to a rash of deepfake cases within China and the kidnapping of Chinese citizens to work in online scam centers in Southeast Asia. Like other buzzwordy tech trends, AI is full of grifting and spam, but scammers and fakes are already part of business in China.

/r/singularity has already suggested that any purported AI regulations coming from China are just a ruse to lull the US into a false sense of security, and that in reality China will continue pushing full steam ahead on AI research regardless of what they might say.

Anyway the main reason I'm posting this is to discuss the merits of the zero-regulation position on AI. I've yet to hear a convincing argument for why it's a good idea, and it puzzles me that so many people who allegedly assign a high likelihood to AI x-risk are also in favor of zero regulation. I know I've asked this question at least once before, in a sub-thread about a year ago, but I can't recall what sorts of responses I got. I'd like to make this a toplevel post to bring in a wider variety of perspectives.

The basic argument is just: let's grant that there's a non-trivial probability of AI causing (or being able to cause) a catastrophic disaster in the near- to medium-term. Then, like many other dangerous things like guns, nukes, certain industrial chemicals, and so forth, it should be legally regulated.

The response is that we can't afford to slow progress, because China and Russia won't slow down and if they get AGI first then they'll conquer us. Ok, maybe. But we can still make significant progress on AI capabilities research even if its use and deployment is heavily regulated. It would just become the exclusive purview of the government, instead of private entities. This is how we handle nukes now. We recognize the importance of having a nuclear arsenal for deterrence, but we don't want people to just develop nukes whenever they want - we try to limit it to a small number of recognized state actors (at least in principle).

The next move is to say, well if the government has AGI and we don't then they'll just oppress us forever, so we need our own AGI in order to be able to fight back. This is one of the arguments in favor of expansive gun rights: the citizenry needs to be able to defend themselves from a tyrannical government. I think this is a pretty bad argument in the gun rights contexts, and I think it's about as bad in the AI context. If the government is truly dedicated to putting down a rebellion, then a well regulated militia isn't going to stop them. You might have guns, but military has more guns, and their guns are bigger. Even if you have AGI, you have to remember that the government also has AGI, in addition to vastly more compute, and control of the majority of existing infrastructure and supply lines. Even an ASI probably can't violate the conservation of matter - it needs atoms to get things done, and you're competing with hostile ASIs for those same atoms. A cadre of freedom fighters standing up to the evil empire with open source models just strikes me as naive.

I think the next move at this point might be something like, well we're on track to develop ASI and its capabilities will be so godlike and will transform reality in such a fundamental way that none of this reasoning about physical logistics really applies, we'll probably transcend the whole notion of "government" at that point anyway. But then why would it really matter how much we regulate right now? Why does it matter which machine the AI god gets instantiated on first? Please walk me through the specifics of the scenario you're envisioning and what your concerns are. At that point it seems like we either have to hope that the AI god is benevolent, in which case we'll be fine either way, or it won't be, in which case we're all screwed. But it's hard to imagine such an entity being "owned" by any one human or group of humans.

TL;DR I don't understand what we have to lose by locking up future AI developments in military facilities, except for the personal profits of some wealthy VCs.

The pro-regulation argument depends on the highly unlikely belief that AI will soon reach a point where we cannot control it. Alignment, I strongly believe, is a complete non-issue. The problem is entirely about control. I think our experience with LLMs shows that alignment is actually pretty easy. The problem will not be AI that we can't get to understand exactly what we mean when we ask it to achieve some goal. The problem will be people deliberately designing AI to do bad things. The question of whether AI destroys us in the short to medium term will depend only on whether we can stop it. Only if AI makes destruction vastly easier than protection will it pose an existential risk.

In the long run, the risk is greater because destructive AI may gradually outcompete us. Natural selection might gradually select for AI that does not value humans. However, this is likely to be extremely slow because its speed will not be a function of how good the AI is but how much selection there is at the civilizational, and I think it's currently about zero and is slowing down. Without war, it doesn't really exist.

The biggest risk is probably that we give the AI the vote and then it votes to exterminate us, but that still requires a long period of likely slow selection and a whole series of other unlikely things that need to go wrong.

I won't say the very long run risk is negligible, it may even be high, but really, the problem is we just can't predict the future that far out. We'll have lots of time to figure this out. There will be a long period where we have extremely advanced AI but are still in control. They will be the time to figure out what to do about it and if we can stop AI from killing is now with smart regulation, we'll certainly be able to do so in the future.

The other thing those arguing for regulation don't understand is that regulation almost never works. The only thing it does reliably is to grind innovation and progress to a halt. AI is one of the few areas of technology that is progressing and it's in large part because of the lack of regulation. What regulation that has been rushed out so far has only proven this more concretely by banning many important uses of the technology and raising unnecessary barriers to entry. There is very little that is likely to reduce existential risk beyond the general stifling of the technology.

I don't just say this because the real risk of AI almost certainly comes from it taking over another country which then invades us, but because even the scenario commonly envisioned by decelerationists is one where we cannot align it, and therefore, requiring training runs to be approved by the government and for standardized safety protocols to be followed has basically no chance of ensuring alignment.

The most likely medium term existential risk I can see is that some kind of symbiosis occurs resulting in an AI industrial complex that takes over the government. Regulation is itself our greatest existential risk. The problem of government alignment is our greatest civilizational threat, not AI.

The actual focus of regulators has been all along and will remain fighting minor perceived social problems that they think AI will exacerbate, like racism, involuntary nudity, defamation, misinformation, job loss, and every form of discrimination justified or not. The purpose is to resist change, not to avoid catastrophe. But stopping the few good kinds of change in a sclerotic, degenerating civilization is setting up a catastrophe of its own. Putting the final nail in the coffin of technological progress means that the problems of stagnation, low fertility, dysgenics, environmental destruction, regulatory burden, and organizational rot will continue.

The pro-regulation argument depends on the highly unlikely belief that AI will soon reach a point where we cannot control it.

The worry though is that you only need to be wrong once. These technologies are going to continue to advance and only grow in complexity.

I think our experience with LLMs shows that alignment is actually pretty easy. The problem will not be AI that we can't get to understand exactly what we mean when we ask it to achieve some goal. The problem will be people deliberately designing AI to do bad things. The question of whether AI destroys us in the short to medium term will depend only on whether we can stop it. Only if AI makes destruction vastly easier than protection will it pose an existential risk.

Until you've got forks like DarkBERT or WormGPT cropping up. And this problem is only going to get worse overtime. All technology is ultimately dual use. Once that genie is out of the bottle, its very unlikely you'll be able to reverse course. AI already poses an existential risk.

The other thing those arguing for regulation don't understand is that regulation almost never works. The only thing it does reliably is to grind innovation and progress to a halt. AI is one of the few areas of technology that is progressing and it's in large part because of the lack of regulation. What regulation that has been rushed out so far has only proven this more concretely by banning many important uses of the technology and raising unnecessary barriers to entry. There is very little that is likely to reduce existential risk beyond the general stifling of the technology.

This is an incredibly ignorant statement. Regulation works in 'many' different ways. Regulation is meant fundamentally to solve collective action problems, and set the rules by which the market operates. Even if we entirely ignore the creation of the Internet via government intervention, the speed of the rate of change in innovation is hardly the sole or even most desirable instrument to measure the efficacy of government regulation. I would agree barriers to entry are one type of problem. But there's a reason airlines don't compete on safety as a cost saving measure when you buy your ticket. Government regulation demands and tries to ensure that they all meet a standard of safety. Clothing companies don't sell two sets of pajamas, with one costing $10 that's flammable, and another that costs $30 but is safe to wear. Regulation says you can't sell flammable pajamas. This prevents corporations from shifting the risk onto the customer when they buy something, and forces business to innovate to maintain a specific quality standard.

Lack of regulation certainly has its upsides. And it'll as quickly drive you off a cliff as your technology advances.