I think most peoples’ revealed preferences will not match their stated preferences here, and revealed preferences are likely to dictate policy.
Conditional on AIs not taking over / until they do, AI is likely to generate a huge economic boom and consumer surplus that increases prosperity, safety, and comfort for many. Yes, there will be some bumps / weirdness / adjustment / inequality, etc., but economic growth can paper over a lot of that. And even if it brings new societal ills and discomfort, AI in the short term is likely to counteract some existing ones—great stagnation, bureaucratic strangulation, vehicle deaths, etc.
The public cannot even bring itself to regulate much less economically useful vices with fewer tradeoffs (online sports gambling, shortform video brainrot, etc.). So I think it’s unlikely that AI will be regulated for any reason short of it becoming common knowledge / deeply-felt belief by nation-state leadership that ASI is in fact likely to cause swift and total human extinction.
I also think a hands-off approach to AI regulation is not going to be particularly off-putting or seem weird or antisocial to a large fraction of the country, namely the ~40% of the country that is right-leaning, and will tend to follow the beliefs of elite republicans who (mostly) still favor a light touch when it comes to any kind of government regulation. Regulating AI for any reason other than extinction is likely to become a relatively standard partisan issue, if it isn’t already.
On the other hand, I would say that we do have examples of the public preferring policies that minimise bumps/weirdness/adjustments over economic growth; most obviously limits on construction/NIMBYism, but also around novel technologies like nuclear energy, GMO crops, mRNA vaccines and self-driving cars. Depending on your views on the economic impacts of migration (I think in practice it’s been less clearly beneficial than many consider it to be in theory), you could add that to the list too.
This is not to say that there won’t be a laissez-faire approach but there is precedent for the public forgoing economic growth for other priorities.
NB: I live in the UK where I think this is more true than in the US, but the examples I gave seem to apply to both countries (and the mRNA example is US-specific).
I think it’s somewhat likely (and quite bad) that various patchwork regulations will be passed in some jurisdictions that limit the benefits and dispersion of AI in the name of protecting jobs or whatever, or various things will already be illegal under current law and AI won’t change that one way or the other, e.g. AI will make it easier / cheaper to build a house or a nuclear power plant, but it will still be illegal to do so in most places that you’d want to.
OTOH I think it’s unlikely (but would be good), if there were a national (and eventually global) moratorium on frontier training runs and research.
In practice I think what is actually on track to happen is that the former kind of regulation will drive more resources (GPUs, human capital, etc.) away from inference and applications and towards research.
(It would be a sad choice, but I would trade away self-driving cars to stave off unaligned ASI. In practice though I think a lot of AI safety advocacy, especially outside of LW, is not actually offering that trade, and will in practice bring about something close to the opposite.)
AI’s not entirely separable from the infrastructure it runs on and companies managing it, and infrastructure and companies do get heavily regulated, even when that has massive negative consequences for economic growth. New York just implemented a moratorium on data centers. We’ve banned AI chip exports. Anthropic was declared a supply chain risk. Every form of energy, from nuclear, to coal, to oil, to solar/wind, now has a potent opposition group.
Overall, it’s seemed to me that software has seen surprisingly little direct regulation, especially when it stays in the consumer category. But the hardware it runs on gets intensively regulated, and software that’s classified as having military applications has also historically been on the receiving end of a lot of restrictions. Since AI is extremely reliant on heavy-duty hardware and also has clear military applications, it will tend to inherit those regulations.
So it will be about the preferences of the many for an economic boom over the NIMBY anti-infrastructure impulse, and we’ve seen the latter win consistently for some time now. I’m not sure how to think about the military angle. As a layman, it seems like we deal with this by having separate markets for military and consumer products, and most military products just don’t have a civilian application so civilians don’t lose much by being denied access to military technology. But if sufficiently powerful AI is intrinsically difficult to guard against being used for destructive purposes by civilians (similar to, say, explosives that do have legitimate economic applications), then we may see the more powerful models being available to civilians only with some combination of safeguards and monitoring that make regulators feel comfortable. And in the limit that probably looks like a hard ceiling on the amount of intelligence being vended to consumers, or regulators surrendering the problem of doling it out to a governing AI that’s entrusted with the problem of figuring out how to give humans access to a lower level of superhuman intelligence that’s still within the power of the governing AI to reliably predict and control.
My guess is that past a certain point, AI becomes able to satisfy “revealed preferences” trivially and cheaply, without actually requiring an unlimited amount of intelligence or AI infrastructure. That might look something like wireheading, or it might look like utopia. Then you get into a bifurcated world where some agents are pursuing goals that genuinely require ever-higher-levels of intelligence, while many people are pursuing traditional consumer goals that are satisfiable with a far less than frontier model. I’m skeptical democracy remains in recognizeable format in this scenario, but if it did, I can’t see ordinary people much caring about how intelligence gets regulated, since they’d still be getting their immediate consumer desires met even if the ultra-intelligence was restricted by the power players.
Aren’t those being widely / effectively circumvented though?
So it will be about the preferences of the many for an economic boom over the NIMBY anti-infrastructure impulse, and we’ve seen the latter win consistently for some time now.
The state-level moratoriums / NIMBYism are exactly the kind of thing I expect not to have their intended effect because they will be patchwork; red states are likely to embrace both the demand and supply side of the AI boom, e.g. by building lots of data centers and rolling out Waymos quickly.
Aren’t those being widely / effectively circumvented though?
To some extent, but overall they’re still having a very large impact, despite that leakage. Anyway, regardless of whether they’re well enforced, it is still a fact that they happened, and I take OP’s point to be more along the lines of “here’s an example of the US government doing a big thing related to AI”.
I think most peoples’ revealed preferences will not match their stated preferences here, and revealed preferences are likely to dictate policy.
Conditional on AIs not taking over / until they do, AI is likely to generate a huge economic boom and consumer surplus that increases prosperity, safety, and comfort for many. Yes, there will be some bumps / weirdness / adjustment / inequality, etc., but economic growth can paper over a lot of that. And even if it brings new societal ills and discomfort, AI in the short term is likely to counteract some existing ones—great stagnation, bureaucratic strangulation, vehicle deaths, etc.
The public cannot even bring itself to regulate much less economically useful vices with fewer tradeoffs (online sports gambling, shortform video brainrot, etc.). So I think it’s unlikely that AI will be regulated for any reason short of it becoming common knowledge / deeply-felt belief by nation-state leadership that ASI is in fact likely to cause swift and total human extinction.
I also think a hands-off approach to AI regulation is not going to be particularly off-putting or seem weird or antisocial to a large fraction of the country, namely the ~40% of the country that is right-leaning, and will tend to follow the beliefs of elite republicans who (mostly) still favor a light touch when it comes to any kind of government regulation. Regulating AI for any reason other than extinction is likely to become a relatively standard partisan issue, if it isn’t already.
On the other hand, I would say that we do have examples of the public preferring policies that minimise bumps/weirdness/adjustments over economic growth; most obviously limits on construction/NIMBYism, but also around novel technologies like nuclear energy, GMO crops, mRNA vaccines and self-driving cars. Depending on your views on the economic impacts of migration (I think in practice it’s been less clearly beneficial than many consider it to be in theory), you could add that to the list too.
This is not to say that there won’t be a laissez-faire approach but there is precedent for the public forgoing economic growth for other priorities.
NB: I live in the UK where I think this is more true than in the US, but the examples I gave seem to apply to both countries (and the mRNA example is US-specific).
I think it’s somewhat likely (and quite bad) that various patchwork regulations will be passed in some jurisdictions that limit the benefits and dispersion of AI in the name of protecting jobs or whatever, or various things will already be illegal under current law and AI won’t change that one way or the other, e.g. AI will make it easier / cheaper to build a house or a nuclear power plant, but it will still be illegal to do so in most places that you’d want to.
OTOH I think it’s unlikely (but would be good), if there were a national (and eventually global) moratorium on frontier training runs and research.
In practice I think what is actually on track to happen is that the former kind of regulation will drive more resources (GPUs, human capital, etc.) away from inference and applications and towards research.
(It would be a sad choice, but I would trade away self-driving cars to stave off unaligned ASI. In practice though I think a lot of AI safety advocacy, especially outside of LW, is not actually offering that trade, and will in practice bring about something close to the opposite.)
AI’s not entirely separable from the infrastructure it runs on and companies managing it, and infrastructure and companies do get heavily regulated, even when that has massive negative consequences for economic growth. New York just implemented a moratorium on data centers. We’ve banned AI chip exports. Anthropic was declared a supply chain risk. Every form of energy, from nuclear, to coal, to oil, to solar/wind, now has a potent opposition group.
Overall, it’s seemed to me that software has seen surprisingly little direct regulation, especially when it stays in the consumer category. But the hardware it runs on gets intensively regulated, and software that’s classified as having military applications has also historically been on the receiving end of a lot of restrictions. Since AI is extremely reliant on heavy-duty hardware and also has clear military applications, it will tend to inherit those regulations.
So it will be about the preferences of the many for an economic boom over the NIMBY anti-infrastructure impulse, and we’ve seen the latter win consistently for some time now. I’m not sure how to think about the military angle. As a layman, it seems like we deal with this by having separate markets for military and consumer products, and most military products just don’t have a civilian application so civilians don’t lose much by being denied access to military technology. But if sufficiently powerful AI is intrinsically difficult to guard against being used for destructive purposes by civilians (similar to, say, explosives that do have legitimate economic applications), then we may see the more powerful models being available to civilians only with some combination of safeguards and monitoring that make regulators feel comfortable. And in the limit that probably looks like a hard ceiling on the amount of intelligence being vended to consumers, or regulators surrendering the problem of doling it out to a governing AI that’s entrusted with the problem of figuring out how to give humans access to a lower level of superhuman intelligence that’s still within the power of the governing AI to reliably predict and control.
My guess is that past a certain point, AI becomes able to satisfy “revealed preferences” trivially and cheaply, without actually requiring an unlimited amount of intelligence or AI infrastructure. That might look something like wireheading, or it might look like utopia. Then you get into a bifurcated world where some agents are pursuing goals that genuinely require ever-higher-levels of intelligence, while many people are pursuing traditional consumer goals that are satisfiable with a far less than frontier model. I’m skeptical democracy remains in recognizeable format in this scenario, but if it did, I can’t see ordinary people much caring about how intelligence gets regulated, since they’d still be getting their immediate consumer desires met even if the ultra-intelligence was restricted by the power players.
Aren’t those being widely / effectively circumvented though?
The state-level moratoriums / NIMBYism are exactly the kind of thing I expect not to have their intended effect because they will be patchwork; red states are likely to embrace both the demand and supply side of the AI boom, e.g. by building lots of data centers and rolling out Waymos quickly.
To some extent, but overall they’re still having a very large impact, despite that leakage. Anyway, regardless of whether they’re well enforced, it is still a fact that they happened, and I take OP’s point to be more along the lines of “here’s an example of the US government doing a big thing related to AI”.