One of the great things about software development is that any reasonably bright human with the right training (or self-training, given available documentation) can do it. It doesn’t require special equipment; your average PC and an Internet connection is quite enough.
(And it’s gotten cheaper and easier. Back when I learned BASIC on the Commodore 64, that computer cost $1400 in today’s dollars, plus another $700 for the floppy disk drive and $100 for a box of blank disks. Today, kids can learn to code on a Raspberry Pi that costs $35, plus $5 for an SD card; so it’s cheaper by a factor of fifty-five … and thousands of times more powerful.)
A consequence of this is that governments cannot prevent people from doing AI research in secret.
Would it help to require ethics classes for computer-science students? Maybe — but given the political climate, I would expect them to focus more on anti-piracy, pro-espionage, and telling students that they would be horrible, evil monsters if they wrote the next PGP, Tor, BitTorrent, or Bitcoin.
I don’t see how your argument at all follows. Some software projects are impossible without large teams—or at least, impossible to do in any reasonable amount of time. And as the number of people who know a secret increases, it gets harder and harder to keep, not just because of increasing risk of deliberate betrayal, but because of increasing risk that someone will screw up on the procedures for keeping communications between the people involved a secret.
One of the great things about software development is that any reasonably bright human with the right training (or self-training, given available documentation) can do it. It doesn’t require special equipment; your average PC and an Internet connection is quite enough.
(And it’s gotten cheaper and easier. Back when I learned BASIC on the Commodore 64, that computer cost $1400 in today’s dollars, plus another $700 for the floppy disk drive and $100 for a box of blank disks. Today, kids can learn to code on a Raspberry Pi that costs $35, plus $5 for an SD card; so it’s cheaper by a factor of fifty-five … and thousands of times more powerful.)
A consequence of this is that governments cannot prevent people from doing AI research in secret.
Would it help to require ethics classes for computer-science students? Maybe — but given the political climate, I would expect them to focus more on anti-piracy, pro-espionage, and telling students that they would be horrible, evil monsters if they wrote the next PGP, Tor, BitTorrent, or Bitcoin.
I don’t see how your argument at all follows. Some software projects are impossible without large teams—or at least, impossible to do in any reasonable amount of time. And as the number of people who know a secret increases, it gets harder and harder to keep, not just because of increasing risk of deliberate betrayal, but because of increasing risk that someone will screw up on the procedures for keeping communications between the people involved a secret.