I think there are a bunch of political problems with regulating all computer hardware progress enough to cause it to totally cease. Think how crucial computers are to the modern world. Really a lot of people will be upset if we stop building them, or stop making better ones. And if one country stops, that just creates an incentive for other countries to step in to dominate this industry. And even aside from that, I don’t think that there’s any regulator in the US at least that has enough authority and internal competence to be able to pull this off. More likely, it becomes a politicized issue. (Compare to the much more straightforward and much more empirically-grounded regulation of instituting a carbon tax for climate change. This is a simple idea, that would help a lot, and is much less costly to the world than halting hardware progress. But instead of being universally adopted, it’s a political issue that different political factions support or oppose.)
But even if we could, this doesn’t solve the problem in a long term way. You need to also halt software progress. Otherwise we’ll continue to tinker with AI designs until we get to some that can run efficiently on 2020′s computers (or 1990′s computers, for that matter).
So in the long run, the only thing in this class that would straight up prevent AGI from being developed is a global, strictly enforced ban on computers. Which seems...not even remotely on the table, on the basis of arguments that are as theoretical as those for AI risk.
There might be some plans in this class that help, by delaying the date of AGI. But that just buys time for some other solution to do the real legwork.
The question here is whether they are capable of regulating it assuming that they are convinced and want to regulate it. It is possible that that it is so incredibly unlikely that they can be convinced that it isn’t worth talking about the question of whether they’re capable of it. I don’t suspect that to be the case, but wouldn’t be surprised if I were wrong.
I think there are a bunch of political problems with regulating all computer hardware progress enough to cause it to totally cease. Think how crucial computers are to the modern world. Really a lot of people will be upset if we stop building them, or stop making better ones. And if one country stops, that just creates an incentive for other countries to step in to dominate this industry. And even aside from that, I don’t think that there’s any regulator in the US at least that has enough authority and internal competence to be able to pull this off. More likely, it becomes a politicized issue. (Compare to the much more straightforward and much more empirically-grounded regulation of instituting a carbon tax for climate change. This is a simple idea, that would help a lot, and is much less costly to the world than halting hardware progress. But instead of being universally adopted, it’s a political issue that different political factions support or oppose.)
But even if we could, this doesn’t solve the problem in a long term way. You need to also halt software progress. Otherwise we’ll continue to tinker with AI designs until we get to some that can run efficiently on 2020′s computers (or 1990′s computers, for that matter).
So in the long run, the only thing in this class that would straight up prevent AGI from being developed is a global, strictly enforced ban on computers. Which seems...not even remotely on the table, on the basis of arguments that are as theoretical as those for AI risk.
There might be some plans in this class that help, by delaying the date of AGI. But that just buys time for some other solution to do the real legwork.
The question here is whether they are capable of regulating it assuming that they are convinced and want to regulate it. It is possible that that it is so incredibly unlikely that they can be convinced that it isn’t worth talking about the question of whether they’re capable of it. I don’t suspect that to be the case, but wouldn’t be surprised if I were wrong.