Comment by slx7
25 days ago
As Moises Naim says, these days power is easy to get, hard to use, easy to loose.
As complexity/unpredictability rises in any system its natual that govt will shed power. We have already seen this with setting of interest rates.
There is a long list of reasons why the Treasury Dept, President, House, Senate, Supreme Court or NASA doesnt get to set the rate.
Why did they hand over that power to the central bank? Read some financial system evolution history. Mindlessly ambitious people, the kind who run things hardly ever hand over power to someone else unless they see weilding the power puts a giant bulls eye on their head when the inevitable unpredictable/uncontrolable event occurs. Same goes with the Church or Religious institutions. Why does govt stay out of that lane? Why did Italy hand over the Vatican to the Church?
there is a huge difference here between that and the central bank
the central bank is semi part of the state, AI Labs are not, AI Labs are fully under directly control of a extremely small number of people in a way which has nothing to do with democracy
founding a Organisation like the FCC but for AI oversight is a completely different topic, but that isn't what he is proposing
> Italy hand over the Vatican to the Church?
because it always had been a nano country under Church control, this is not comparable at all
> Church or Religious institutions.
most democracies have a separation of state and religion where religion has little to no governing power. When this isn't the case it's a failure of the state (often for historic reason). This isn't desirable at all.
Haven't read the article, but multiple times during my life I have had to research how to do things in a domain, and have come up against academia (both literature and people), who seemed to have formed an opinion on how to approach certain problems, and what sort of properties a desirable 'correct' solution should have. When I have dug into the reasoning of why things have to be this way, the arguments often devolved into a matter of taste, or the strength of justifications have weakened considerably.
Nevertheless, if one were to turn their backs on existing research, not only would they draw the ire of academics (idc that much), but also would have to do a lot of stuff from scratch themselves, which usually is quite the undertaking.
These flamewars are not uncommon in CS, and usually involve forces and intellects much bigger than mine, and we often end up looking back at viable things left behind in computing history, just because the mainstream decided to go a different way.
If we are to outsource thinking to AI models, we will outsource these consensus driven 'rational' decisions to them, and then AI companies will have a pretty large say on what 'correct' opinions will look like.