Comment by evrydayhustling
3 years ago
> most of the problems of regulating AIs apply to regulating corporations, which can be thought of as AIs with slow internal data transfer
Or to regulating humans, who are like AIs with squishy bodies but still manage to build and manipulate dangerous stuff.
It is bizarre to me how doomist theses act like our society has never had to absorb autonomous unpredictable actors, yet that is exactly what society is made up of.
The doomists' concern isn't that they can act autonomously, it's that they can act autonomously and fast. It's the difference between calculating numbers by hand vs on a massively parallel CPU, or between a flintlock musket and a Gatling gun.
Those advances -- musket to Gatling gun, calculator to CPU -- are great examples of what our laws and customs must adapt to continuously.
In those cases, we could draw on analogy on things that were already possible for organizations - a machine gun is a one man army, a cpu does the work of a room of accountants. We have never had a Gatling gun for cogent paragraphs before, but we have contact centers full of scammers and propagandists.
A productive approach to controlling AI could start with considering our controls for these organizations (and how to make them work), and then address the concentration afforded by AI. Exceptionalism about what AI can do is a distraction.
The difference between a set of hand warmers and an M80 is primarily speed of the exothermic reaction. And I love the corporation metaphor, because unlike humans, corporations have no soul and no conscience. If a man behaved like a corporation we would call him a psychopath. So our goal must be to provide AGI a conscience and to prevent psychopathy at all costs, or we can absolutely expect AGI to go off like a nuclear explosion.