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