Comment by diggan
2 years ago
> It really seems beyond dispute that there are certain tools so powerful that we have no choice but to tightly control access.
Beyond dispute? Hardly.
But please do illustrate your point with some details and tell us why you think certain tools are too powerful for everyone to have access to.
Firearms. Biological weapons. Nuclear weapons. Chemical weapons. Certain drugs.
I don't know, seems like there's a very long list of stuff we don't want freely circulating.
Machine learning is a general use tool. It's like Socrates decrying writing as harmful (which we only know of because Plato wrote it down).
You cannot use any of those weapons you mention as anything other than weapons. LLMs, diffusion nets, and classification systems have general use: in medicine, in business, in software engineering, in science, in marketing. These machine learning systems are hyper-advanced printing presses. I'm sure many of the world's governments consider that exceedingly dangerous.
Firearms, biological weapons, nuclear weapons, and chemical weapons all have a single use: to kill people or destroy things. Can you put ML components in to weapons systems? Yes. But that is the same as controlling weapons systems with software, and we don't outlaw all software because some of it could be used to control weapons systems.
ML components are software. Advanced software, not even close to "AI" or, since we've lost that term to marketers, AGI. This regulation is like asking the team making a compiler for $language to ensure that the compiler cannot be used to make malicious software. It's silly on the face of it.
Hydrogen bombs, because allowing anyone to raze a city during a temper tantrum is bad.
Regulating AI is not like regulating hydrogen bombs, it’s like regulating nuclear physics.
Maybe true but not relevant to the argument: are some tools so powerful that access to them ought to be “tightly controlled?” The answer is definitely yes.
Thermonuclear weapons are great for excavating large amounts of landmass in quick order. However I would propose that we nonetheless do not make them available to everyone.