Comment by seanmcdirmid
2 years ago
The safe business won’t hold very long if someone can gain a short term business advantage with unsafe AI. Eventually government has to step in with a legal and enforcement framework to prevent greed from ruining things.
It's possible that safety will eventually become the business advantage, just like privacy can be a business advantage today but wasn't taken so seriously 10-15 years ago by the general public.
This is not even that far-fetched. A safe AI that you can trust should be far more useful and economically valuable than an unsafe AI that you cannot trust. AI systems today aren't powerful enough for the difference to really matter yet, because present AI systems are mostly not yet acting as fully autonomous agents having a tangible impact on the world around them.
Government is controlled by the highest bidder. I think we should be prepared to do this ourselves by refusing to accept money made by unsafe businesses, even if it means saying goodbye to the convenience of fungible money.
> Government is controlled by the highest bidder.
While this might be true for the governments you have personally experienced, this is far from being an aphorism.
"Government doesn't work. We just need to make a new government that is much more effective and far reaching in controlling people's behavior."
Banding together and refusing to accept harmful money is indeed akin to creating a government, and would indeed be more effective at controlling people's behavior.
But participation would be voluntary, and the restriction of harmful behavior would apply to it's enemies, not its citizens. So I'm not quite sure what the problem is.
That's not what they said though. Seems to me more of a libertarian ideal than making a new government.
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Replace government with collective society assurance that no one cheats so we aren’t all doomed. Otherwise, someone will do it, and we all will have to bear the consequences.
If only enough individuals are willing to buy these services, then again we all will bear the consequences. There is no way out of this where libertarian ideals can be used to come to a safe result. What makes this even a more wicked problem is that decisions made in other countries will affect us all as well, we can’t isolate ourselves from AI policies made in China for example.
which government?
will China obey US regoolations? will Russia?
No, which makes this an even harder problem. Can US companies bound by one set of rules compete against Chinese ones bound by another set of rules? No, probably not. Humanity will have to come together on this, or someone will develop killer AI that kills us all.