I think on the level of individual people, there’s a mix of moral and self-interested actions. People sometimes choose to do the right thing (even if the right thing is as complicated as taking metaethics and metaphilosophy into account), or can be convinced to do so. But with corporations it’s another matter: they choose the profit motive pretty much every time.
Making an AI lab do the right thing is much harder than making its leader concerned. A lab leader who’s concerned enough to slow down will be pressured by investors to speed back up, or get replaced, or get outcompeted. Really you need to convince the whole lab and its investors. And you need to be more convincing than the magic of the market! Recall that in many of these labs, the leaders / investors / early employees started out very concerned about AI safety and were reading LW. Then the magic of the market happened and now the labs are racing at full speed, do you think our convincing abilities can be stronger than the thing that did that? The profit motive, again. In my first comment there was a phrase about things being not profitable to understand.
What it adds up to is, even with our uncertainty about ethics and metaethics, it seems to me that concentration of power is itself a force against morality. The incentives around concentrated power are all wrong. Spreading out power is a good thing that enables other good things, enables individuals to sometimes choose what’s right. I’m not absolutely certain but that’s my current best guess.
A lab leader who’s concerned enough to slow down will be pressured by investors to speed back up, or get replaced, or get outcompeted. Really you need to convince the whole lab and its investors. And you need to be more convincing than the magic of the market!
This seems to imply that lab leaders would be easier to convince if there were no investors and no markets, in other words if they had more concentrated power.
If you spread out the power of AI more, won’t all those decentralized nodes of spread out AI power still have to compete with each other in markets? If market pressures are the core problem, how does decentralization solve that?
I’m concerned that your proposed solution attacks “concentration of power” when the real problem you’ve identified is more like market dynamics. If so, it could fail to solve the problem or make it even worse.
My own perspective is that markets are a definite problem, and concentration of power per se is more ambiguous (I’m not sure if it’s good or bad). To solve AI x-safety we basically have to bypass or override markets somehow, e.g., through international agreements and government regulations/bans.
I think AI offers a chance of getting huge power over others, so it would create competitive pressure in any case. In case of a market economy it’s market pressure, but in case of countries it would be a military arms race instead. And even if the labs didn’t get any investors and raced secretly, I think they’d still feel under a lot of pressure. The chance of getting huge power is what creates the problem, that’s why I think spreading out power is a good idea. There would still be competition of course, but it would be normal economic levels of competition, and people would have some room to do the right things.
I think on the level of individual people, there’s a mix of moral and self-interested actions. People sometimes choose to do the right thing (even if the right thing is as complicated as taking metaethics and metaphilosophy into account), or can be convinced to do so. But with corporations it’s another matter: they choose the profit motive pretty much every time.
Making an AI lab do the right thing is much harder than making its leader concerned. A lab leader who’s concerned enough to slow down will be pressured by investors to speed back up, or get replaced, or get outcompeted. Really you need to convince the whole lab and its investors. And you need to be more convincing than the magic of the market! Recall that in many of these labs, the leaders / investors / early employees started out very concerned about AI safety and were reading LW. Then the magic of the market happened and now the labs are racing at full speed, do you think our convincing abilities can be stronger than the thing that did that? The profit motive, again. In my first comment there was a phrase about things being not profitable to understand.
What it adds up to is, even with our uncertainty about ethics and metaethics, it seems to me that concentration of power is itself a force against morality. The incentives around concentrated power are all wrong. Spreading out power is a good thing that enables other good things, enables individuals to sometimes choose what’s right. I’m not absolutely certain but that’s my current best guess.
This seems to imply that lab leaders would be easier to convince if there were no investors and no markets, in other words if they had more concentrated power.
If you spread out the power of AI more, won’t all those decentralized nodes of spread out AI power still have to compete with each other in markets? If market pressures are the core problem, how does decentralization solve that?
I’m concerned that your proposed solution attacks “concentration of power” when the real problem you’ve identified is more like market dynamics. If so, it could fail to solve the problem or make it even worse.
My own perspective is that markets are a definite problem, and concentration of power per se is more ambiguous (I’m not sure if it’s good or bad). To solve AI x-safety we basically have to bypass or override markets somehow, e.g., through international agreements and government regulations/bans.
I think AI offers a chance of getting huge power over others, so it would create competitive pressure in any case. In case of a market economy it’s market pressure, but in case of countries it would be a military arms race instead. And even if the labs didn’t get any investors and raced secretly, I think they’d still feel under a lot of pressure. The chance of getting huge power is what creates the problem, that’s why I think spreading out power is a good idea. There would still be competition of course, but it would be normal economic levels of competition, and people would have some room to do the right things.