(Warning: this response is long and much of it is covered by what Tamgen and others have said. )
The way I understand your fears, they fall into four main categories. In the order you raise them and, I think, in order of importance these concerns are as follows:
1) Regulations tend to cause harm to people, therefore we should not regulate AI.
I completely agree that a Federal AI Regulatory Commission will impose costs in the form of human suffering. This is inevitable, since Policy Debates Should Not Appear One Sided. Maybe in the world without the FAIRC, some AI Startup cures Alzheimer’s or even aging a good decade before AGI. In the world with FAIRC, we risk condemning all those people to dementia and decrepitude. This is quite similar to FDA unintended consequences.
Response:
You suggest that the OP was playing reference class tennis, but to me looking at the problem in terms of “regulators” and “harm” is the wrong reference class. They are categories that do not help us predict the answer to the one question we care about most: what is the impact on timelines to AGI?
If we zoom in closer to the object level, it becomes clear that the mechanism by which regulators harm the public is by impeding production. Using Paul Christiano’s rules of reference class tennis, “regulation impedes production” is a more probable narrative (i.e. supported by greater evidence, albeit not simpler) than simply “regulation always causes harm.” At the object level, we see this directly as when the FDA shoots fines anyone with the temerity to produce cheaper EpiPens, the nuclear regulatory commission doesn’t let anyone build nuclear reactors, etc. Or it can happen indirectly as a drag on innovation. To count the true cost of the FDA, we need to know how many wondrous medical breakthroughs we’ve already made on Earth prime.
But if you truly believe that AGI represents an existential threat, and that at present innovation speeds AGI happens before Alignment, then AI progress (even when it solves Alzheimers) is on net a negative. The lives saved by Alzheimer’s have to be balanced against human extinction—and the balance leaves us way, way in the red. This means that all the regulatory failure modes you cite in your reply become net beneficial. We want to impede production.
By way of analogy, it would be as if Pfizer were nearly guaranteed to be working its way toward making a pill that would instantly wipe out humanity; or if Nuclear power actually was as dangerous as its detractors believe! Under such scenarios, the FDA is your best friend. Unfortunately, that is where we stand with AI.
To return to the key question: once it is clear that, at a mechanical level, the things that regulatory agencies do are to impede production, it also becomes clear that regulation is likely to lengthen AGI timelines.
2) The voting public is insufficiently knowledgeable about AI.
I’m not sure I understand the objection here. The government regulates tons of things that the electorate doesn’t understand. In fact, ideally that is what regulatory agencies do. They say, “hey we are a democracy, but you, the demos, don’t understand how education works so we need a department of education.” This is often self-serving patronage, but the general point stands that the way regulatory agencies come into being in practice is not because the electorate achieves subject-area expertise. I can see a populist appeal for a Manhattan project to speed up AI in order to “beat China” (or whatever enemy du jour), but this is not the sort of thing that regulators in permanent bureaucracies do. (Just look at operation “warp speed”; quite apart from the irony in the name, the FDA and the CDC had to be dragged kicking and screaming to do it.)
3) Governments might use AI to do evil things
In your response you write:
As for deliberate evil, it’s worth considering the track record of regimes both historically and in the present day. Even leaving aside the horrors of feudalism, Nazism and twentieth century Communism, Putin is currently pursuing a war of aggression complete with war-crimes, Xi is inflicting unspeakable tortures on captive Uighurs, Kim Jong-Un is maintaining a state which keeps its subjects in grinding poverty and demands constant near-worship, and the list continues. It should be quite obvious, I hope, why the idea of such a regime gaining controllable AI would produce an astronomical suffering risk.
I agree, of course, that these are all terrible evils wrought by governments. But I’m not sure what it has to do with regulation of AI. The historical incidents you cite would be relevant if the Holocaust were perpetrated by the German Bureau of Chemical Safety or if the Uighurs were imprisoned by the Chinese Ethnic Affairs Commission. Permanent regulatory bureaucracies are not and never have been responsible for (or even capable of) mission-driven atrocities. They do commit atrocities, but only by preventing access to useful goods (i.e. impeding production).
Finally, one sentence in this section sticks out and makes me think we are talking past each other. You write:
the idea of such a regime gaining controllable AI would produce an astronomical suffering risk
By my lights, this would be a WONDERFUL problem to have. An AI that was controllable by anyone (including Kim Jung-Un, Pol Pot, or Hitler) would, in my estimation, be preferable to a completely unaligned paper clip maximizer. Maybe we disagree here?
4) Liberal democracies are not magic, and we can’t expect them to make the right decisions just because of our own political values.
I don’t think my OP mentioned liberal democracy, but if I gave that impression then you are quite right I did so in error. You may be referring to my point about China. I did not mean to imply a normative superiority of American or any other democracy, and I regret the lack of clarity. My intent was to make a positive observation that governments do, in fact, mimic each other’s regulatory growth. Robin Hanson makes a similar point; that governments copy each other largely because of institutional and informal status associations. This observation is neutral with regard to political system. If we announce a FAIRC, I predict that China will follow, and with due haste.
Hi Aiyen, thanks for clarification.
(Warning: this response is long and much of it is covered by what Tamgen and others have said. )
The way I understand your fears, they fall into four main categories. In the order you raise them and, I think, in order of importance these concerns are as follows:
1) Regulations tend to cause harm to people, therefore we should not regulate AI.
I completely agree that a Federal AI Regulatory Commission will impose costs in the form of human suffering. This is inevitable, since Policy Debates Should Not Appear One Sided. Maybe in the world without the FAIRC, some AI Startup cures Alzheimer’s or even aging a good decade before AGI. In the world with FAIRC, we risk condemning all those people to dementia and decrepitude. This is quite similar to FDA unintended consequences.
Response:
You suggest that the OP was playing reference class tennis, but to me looking at the problem in terms of “regulators” and “harm” is the wrong reference class. They are categories that do not help us predict the answer to the one question we care about most: what is the impact on timelines to AGI?
If we zoom in closer to the object level, it becomes clear that the mechanism by which regulators harm the public is by impeding production. Using Paul Christiano’s rules of reference class tennis, “regulation impedes production” is a more probable narrative (i.e. supported by greater evidence, albeit not simpler) than simply “regulation always causes harm.” At the object level, we see this directly as when the FDA
shootsfines anyone with the temerity to produce cheaper EpiPens, the nuclear regulatory commission doesn’t let anyone build nuclear reactors, etc. Or it can happen indirectly as a drag on innovation. To count the true cost of the FDA, we need to know how many wondrous medical breakthroughs we’ve already made on Earth prime.But if you truly believe that AGI represents an existential threat, and that at present innovation speeds AGI happens before Alignment, then AI progress (even when it solves Alzheimers) is on net a negative. The lives saved by Alzheimer’s have to be balanced against human extinction—and the balance leaves us way, way in the red. This means that all the regulatory failure modes you cite in your reply become net beneficial. We want to impede production.
By way of analogy, it would be as if Pfizer were nearly guaranteed to be working its way toward making a pill that would instantly wipe out humanity; or if Nuclear power actually was as dangerous as its detractors believe! Under such scenarios, the FDA is your best friend. Unfortunately, that is where we stand with AI.
To return to the key question: once it is clear that, at a mechanical level, the things that regulatory agencies do are to impede production, it also becomes clear that regulation is likely to lengthen AGI timelines.
2) The voting public is insufficiently knowledgeable about AI.
I’m not sure I understand the objection here. The government regulates tons of things that the electorate doesn’t understand. In fact, ideally that is what regulatory agencies do. They say, “hey we are a democracy, but you, the demos, don’t understand how education works so we need a department of education.” This is often self-serving patronage, but the general point stands that the way regulatory agencies come into being in practice is not because the electorate achieves subject-area expertise. I can see a populist appeal for a Manhattan project to speed up AI in order to “beat China” (or whatever enemy du jour), but this is not the sort of thing that regulators in permanent bureaucracies do. (Just look at operation “warp speed”; quite apart from the irony in the name, the FDA and the CDC had to be dragged kicking and screaming to do it.)
3) Governments might use AI to do evil things
In your response you write:
I agree, of course, that these are all terrible evils wrought by governments. But I’m not sure what it has to do with regulation of AI. The historical incidents you cite would be relevant if the Holocaust were perpetrated by the German Bureau of Chemical Safety or if the Uighurs were imprisoned by the Chinese Ethnic Affairs Commission. Permanent regulatory bureaucracies are not and never have been responsible for (or even capable of) mission-driven atrocities. They do commit atrocities, but only by preventing access to useful goods (i.e. impeding production).
Finally, one sentence in this section sticks out and makes me think we are talking past each other. You write:
By my lights, this would be a WONDERFUL problem to have. An AI that was controllable by anyone (including Kim Jung-Un, Pol Pot, or Hitler) would, in my estimation, be preferable to a completely unaligned paper clip maximizer. Maybe we disagree here?
4) Liberal democracies are not magic, and we can’t expect them to make the right decisions just because of our own political values.
I don’t think my OP mentioned liberal democracy, but if I gave that impression then you are quite right I did so in error. You may be referring to my point about China. I did not mean to imply a normative superiority of American or any other democracy, and I regret the lack of clarity. My intent was to make a positive observation that governments do, in fact, mimic each other’s regulatory growth. Robin Hanson makes a similar point; that governments copy each other largely because of institutional and informal status associations. This observation is neutral with regard to political system. If we announce a FAIRC, I predict that China will follow, and with due haste.