complete surveillance of all citizens and all elites
Certainly at a human level this is unrealistic. In a way it’s also overkill—if use of an AI is an essential step towards doing anything dangerous, the “surveillance” can just be of what AIs are doing or thinking.
This assumes that you can tell whether an AI input or output is dangerous. But the same thing applies to video surveillance—if you can’t tell whether a person is brewing something harmless or harmful, having a video camera in their kitchen is no use.
At a posthuman level, mere video surveillance actually does not go far enough, again because a smart deceiver can carry out their dastardly plots in a way that isn’t evident until it’s too late. For a transhuman civilization that has values to preserve, I see no alternative to enforcing that every entity above a certain level of intelligence (basically, smart enough to be dangerous) is also internally aligned, so that there is no disposition to hatch dastardly plots in the first place.
This may sound totalitarian, but it’s not that different to what humanity attempts to instill in the course of raising children and via education and culture. We have law to deter and punish transgressors, but we also have these developmental feedbacks that are intended to create moral, responsible adults that don’t have such inclinations, or that at least restrain themselves.
In a civilization where it is theoretically possible to create a mind with any set of dispositions at all, from paperclip maximizer to rationalist bodhisattva, the “developmental feedbacks” need to extend more deeply into the processes that design and create possible minds, than they do in a merely human civilization.
Certainly at a human level this is unrealistic. In a way it’s also overkill—if use of an AI is an essential step towards doing anything dangerous, the “surveillance” can just be of what AIs are doing or thinking.
This assumes that you can tell whether an AI input or output is dangerous. But the same thing applies to video surveillance—if you can’t tell whether a person is brewing something harmless or harmful, having a video camera in their kitchen is no use.
At a posthuman level, mere video surveillance actually does not go far enough, again because a smart deceiver can carry out their dastardly plots in a way that isn’t evident until it’s too late. For a transhuman civilization that has values to preserve, I see no alternative to enforcing that every entity above a certain level of intelligence (basically, smart enough to be dangerous) is also internally aligned, so that there is no disposition to hatch dastardly plots in the first place.
This may sound totalitarian, but it’s not that different to what humanity attempts to instill in the course of raising children and via education and culture. We have law to deter and punish transgressors, but we also have these developmental feedbacks that are intended to create moral, responsible adults that don’t have such inclinations, or that at least restrain themselves.
In a civilization where it is theoretically possible to create a mind with any set of dispositions at all, from paperclip maximizer to rationalist bodhisattva, the “developmental feedbacks” need to extend more deeply into the processes that design and create possible minds, than they do in a merely human civilization.