Comment by dorolow
2 hours ago
I am an AI Safety Person and I want the government to nationalize or have a significant stake in the frontier labs and to have democratic control of the development of the technology. The AI Safety movement is not a monolith. I do not think Eliezer Yudkowsky nor his acolytes should hold the reins, but a lot of folks sure like to create a strawman that anyone who wants to regulate OpenAI is somehow an EA/MIRI weirdo
Yes I trust this government with that power. /extreme sarcasm
Yes I trust sama/dario/elon with that power
/even more extreme sarcasm than you
I don't trust them, which is why I inherently question the validity of their RSI/bioweapon/extinction claims.
You trust trump more than any of those three? Really?
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That's an extremely fair objection! But despite the many, many flaws of our government and the current administration, I still have (hopefully) a chance to vote them out of power. I have no such hopes with Sam Altman or Elon Musk.
> and to have democratic control of the development of the technology
Why? I don't care about democratically participating in a closed model's development. It doesn't belong to me.
China will develop whatever they want, a federal stake in OpenAI or Anthropic punishes Americans and shields US labs from legitimate competition.
In my mind, democratic control of the technology means that we (the govt, or other empowered agency) take ownership of their assets and IP, solve or find a level of alignment or guardrails that society is comfortable with. Then we distribute the technology, or access to it, to avoid power concentration. This would also certainly require international coordination with China on a slowdown or pause, which I think is possible.
> This would also certainly require international coordination with China on a slowdown or pause
Personally I think the country with a strictly meritocratic elite selection system that also just outright kills you if you sell weed will have a hard time sympathizing with Bay Area thinkers who talk about AI killing us all during their ayahuasca breakfast before returning to their meth fueled crunch towards releasing the next version of the AI that will kill us all.
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Yikes. Hopefully you never gain any power or influence. The last thing we need is more economic central planning. I sincerely hope that you fail.
Do you think things like the Manhattan Project were a mistake? Comparing AI to nuclear weapons is perhaps a stretch, but I think most people recognize that certain technologies or artifacts are best monopolized by our governing bodies. I think if the capabilities of AI systems keep growing on trend, it is not unreasonable to think wonton usage could disrupt society or cause mass harm.
to have democratic control of the development of the technology
Not super interested in what the people who elected Donald Trump POTUS twice think about AI.
(Of course, with Musk and Brockman in the C-suites at two of three major labs, that's what we'll get either way.)
Fair objection, but I still think it is lower risk to diffuse power and control of a potentially dangerous and revolutionary technology than to leave it in the hands of the few elites who have not show much ethical integrity so far.
Is Greg Brockman right wing?
He's the largest single private donor to the Trump 2024 campaign, as I understand it, at $25 million.
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