AI firms mustn’t govern themselves, say ex-members of OpenAI’s board

https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2024/05/26/ai-firms-mustnt-govern-themselves-say-ex-members-of-openais-board

by sashank_1509 • 2 years ago

181 187 2 years ago

behnamoh• 2 years ago

Any talk about AI governance (either pro or against) just further feeds the AI hype. I work in the AI industry and know the benefits, but tbh 90% of startups out there don't deserve the amount of attention (read: VC money) they receive. It'll burst, and it will be ugly.

The only one benefiting from all the AI bubble is nvidia (fuck them).

fnetisma• 2 years ago

Sure there will be corrective behaviour in the market, and the better product with more outreach, better experience will win over suboptimal products with overlapping offerings, but does that mean that the current generative AI momentum is hollow or there is a sticky use case behind the promises? And if so, in your opinion, how overstated is the Total Addressable Market compared to what’s claimed by an aggregate of startups across the VC space?

dmix2• 2 years ago

And let me guess these 2 want to be the ones controlling it (again but with more power)

toomuchtodo• 2 years ago

People who want to govern shouldn’t be in the role. This selects for service over seeking power.

whimsicalism9• 2 years ago

good luck lol

theropost• 2 years ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_road_to_hell_is_paved_wi...

williamtrask• 2 years ago

there's really no evidence of that (in the article or otherwise)

dmix2• 2 years ago

You must not have read much into these people

I previously dug into Helen Toner’s history and listened to her talks at conferences on YouTube (including an Effective Altruism one) and read her interviews on other sites where she was strongly against GPT being released to the public. Then we have their behaviour and comments during the coup attempt and her temporary OpenAI CEO, Emmett Shear, she brought in who made a number of radical statements about wanting to cripple AI research before he was put forward as CEO and then he made an awkward, and very evasive, initial statement to employees that scared off many to Sam’s side. He too played coy about his intentions during that timeframe just like Helen avoided publicity despite being the spare, but her past states were revelatory. Not exactly someone’s opinion I trust.

This is just being spun as a moderate stance on AI regulation by people who IRL have much more aggressive and non mainstream takes on stopping AI development.

Which is why I ask who will be the caretaker in this scenario.

cpursley2• 2 years ago

You’re getting downvoted but regulatory capture and cronyism (voting in laws that prohibit new entrants; for the greater good, of course) is a trick as old as democratic systems been have established, maybe older and perhaps not exclusive to democracy.

hn_throwaway_995• 2 years ago

He's getting downvoted because the article specifically calls out the risks of cronyism and regulatory capture.

A paywall workaround was posted: https://archive.is/wbwC2. It would benefit a lot of commenters here if they actually read the article first.

hnlmorg2• 2 years ago

No company should govern themselves. AI or others

Loughla• 2 years ago

What?

hiddencost• 2 years ago

This is what boards are for.

nicce2• 2 years ago

Rather, if you want to pursuit on providing valuable service or product, you should not have shareholders at all. Or any dependency whatsoever.

No pressure for maximizing profits and abuse your position for profits.

crazygringo2• 2 years ago

Shareholders are just owners.

Every company has to have owners (even if those owners are the employees, for instance). Owners ultimately make the decisions, by electing a board which oversees management.

Anyone starting a company is free to cap profits if they want. You can write it directly into the articles of incorporation.

Obviously it makes it harder to find investors, so good luck.

diego_sandoval2• 2 years ago

Do you also think that no person should govern themself?

hnlmorg2• 2 years ago

We already don’t govern ourselves. We have something called “laws”.

Most people aren’t assholes but it only takes a small minority to ruin it for the rest of us.

TulliusCicero• 2 years ago

It might be reasonable to have regulations here, but I shudder to think what form they would take, given the typical government level of technological expertise and understanding.

andy992• 2 years ago

Existing laws cover almost everything "bad" you could do with AI/ML. It's not like there's some "I used AI" loophole that exempts one from the law. So most of this is about either regulatory capture, self importance (oh, my linear algebra research is like inventing the atom bomb), ideology, power seeking or a combination.

janice19995• 2 years ago

Existing laws cover almost everything "bad" you could do with AI/ML.

If (like many non-EU countries and parts of the US) you don't already have basic digital privacy laws, transparency or consumer protections, that is simply not true.

NegativeLatency• 2 years ago

I’m not suggesting we’re at this point now, but it would be nice if we create sentient AI if it wasn’t enslaved. I think we would probably need some new laws for the case of non human personhood

Not sure what laws would apply or how they’d be enforced based on how we treat people and say chimps, and corporations like people.

nicce2• 2 years ago

Existing laws cover almost everything "bad" you could do with AI/ML.

Not really. They regulate the AI itself, not the people behind it. There should be real consequences of doing something bad with it intentionally. That is the only way.

pessimizer2• 2 years ago

It's not like there's some "I used AI" loophole that exempts one from the law.

There is, it's called a judge. When they explain to him that AIs are by definition neutral and objective and are let off. I'm sure the regulations will just serve to formalize this process, by Congressionally defining AIs that satisfy some checklist of lobbied for conditions as objective and neutral. After a few years, the collective liability from taking back this declaration will keep Congress from ever reverting it.

They've been into defining things lately. The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_pi_bill just came too early.

tbrownaw3• 2 years ago

I believe there's a few cases where you're allowed to talk about Fact A, and you're allowed to talk about Fact B, but you're not allowed to talk about both Fact A and Fact B at the same time. Mostly (entirely?) having to do with export restrictions around technologies that the government wants to keep away from other countries it doesn't like.

I'd think that an AI system that answers questions combining both could get its makers in trouble in ways that a standard search engine finding separate results about each from separate queries probably wouldn't.

janice19995• 2 years ago

but I shudder to think what form they would take

The EU just passed the AI Act based on the inputs of experts and with widespread support from its Parliament and Council.

pelorat• 2 years ago

In about two years time, most AI providers will realize that the EU is not worth the effort and pack up and leave. The repercussions from the AI act has not begun yet.

whimsicalism9• 2 years ago

Frankly I don’t think the EU should be held up as an example of a well-informed regulatory apparatus.

JumpCrisscross5• 2 years ago

shudder to think what form they would take, given the typical government level of technological expertise and understanding

Start with public disclosure. A repository where AI firms publicly file simple, standardised information—model architecture, training sources, intended user, responsible executives, et cetera—that can guide the public and policymakers in future rulemaking.

More generally, this complaint about electeds’ domain expertise misunderstands how modern states work. Congress can’t build a plane. That doesn’t mean they can’t build the FAA.

tomrod• 2 years ago

That already is starting up, albeit slowly, for gov agencies as well as best practices.

ramblenode• 2 years ago

Congress can delegate decisions to expert bodies, and often does. But Congress is also quite comfortable simply legislating a solution, which may be ill-informed or with ulterior intent.

Speaking of planes, Congress took a direct role in the design specifications of the F-35 to the detriment of that program. Notably, they required a common airframe that could support VTOL, despite objections from the Army, Navy, and Air Force (the USMC wanted it and lobbied for it). This greatly added to the complexity and cost of the program.

web3-is-a-scam• 2 years ago

I don’t trust industry to self-regulate and I definitey don’t trust the government to be able to regulate it effectively.

Honestly, we’re f*cked

Y_Y2• 2 years ago

In fairness, based on the position you've put forward, I can't imagine an unfuckable situation.

solardev3• 2 years ago

Maybe we need an AI democracy where the AI themselves vote for regulations.

candiddevmike• 2 years ago

China invades Taiwan, fabs get destroyed, AI winter ensues because of lack of hardware?

thegrim33• 2 years ago

Well one way out is if large language models don't just somehow magically turn into human level (or better) AGI at some point once enough data has been thrown at it. Then the whole debate will turn out to be pretty moot.

hnuser123456• 2 years ago

The AI shall govern itself.

bboygravity• 2 years ago

Until some smart people read and understand "the book of why".

JumpCrisscross5• 2 years ago

if large language models don't just somehow magically turn into human level (or better) AGI at some point once enough data has been thrown at it

This was fundraising marketing. There is zero evidence LLMs scale to AGI.

beachy2• 2 years ago

I don't get this hand waving.

Does anyone really think that nefarious foreign powers aren't already researching with no guard rails, with the explicit goal of developing AI-powered autonomous weapons, propaganda platforms, deepfake extortion sites, scambots etc.?

You can be sure they won't be slowed down by regulation.

lttlrck• 2 years ago

If there is any regulation I imagine there will be huge carve outs for the military industrial complex.

andy992• 2 years ago

All current "guardrails" are silly censorship / political correctness stuff, or for business appropriateness. They are also trivially circumvented. There is no "threat" from the un-shielded capability of current or foreseeable ML models.

pessimizer2• 2 years ago

Excellent defense of biological weapons programs. Nothing like an assumed fascism "missile gap" to commit to chasing. What if other countries start experimenting with bringing back chattel slavery? How will we compete? Shouldn't we just assume that they have already, and we're behind?

Our scum is no less nefarious than their scum.

edit: the answer is to cooperate, rather than antagonize. We realized this in the past with nukes, but the least moral people in the world think that entering agreements between state-sized powers is just a delaying tactic until you can get an advantage. Let's figure out how to relieve those people of power as if all of our lives depended on it. If other countries being prosperous is always going to be considered a threat, we're always going to be in a fight that ends in mutual destruction.

janice19995• 2 years ago

You can be sure they won't be slowed down by regulation.

You should read up on existing regulations. The EU AI Act explicitly exempts national security, research and military uses for example.

Regulation isn't some all or nothing force that smothers everything. It's carefully crafted legislation (well, should be../) that is supposed to work to benefit the state and its citizens. Let's not give OpenAI a free for all to do anything because you think China is making Skynet drones.

paulddraper3• 2 years ago

Serious question: what is it about AI that you want regulated?

---

I find that a certain segment of the population have a knee-jerk "well we need rules about this." But they're less clear about what. "Just...something, I'm sure."

Personally, I don't see what novel concern AI poses that isn't already present in privacy law, copyrights, contracts, torts, off-shoring, etc.

loceng2• 2 years ago

Regulations will go something like this: 1) anything that can be harmful, say targeting of a population, isn't allowed to be owned or be accessed-available for the individual, 2) except for government and state-funded [bad] actors who have a "legal" monopoly of violence - those governments who use that usually captured/corrupted and of authoritarian-tyrannical nature.

magpi3• 2 years ago

Anything involving life or death decisions

Lerc4• 2 years ago

The biggest short term harm comes from their utility, anything that enables an individual to do something that previously required a group stands a greater chance of a single insane/radical/extremest finding a way to do something terrible on their own when they couldn't previously. The oft cited example is someone developing a biological weapon with AI assistance. While you could say we already have laws saying you can't do this, that offers little protection against the scenario where the party performing the action is undetected until it is too late.

I see some AI regulation proposals specifically prohibit AIs that might assist to biological weapons. This strikes me as missing the point. The risk isn't something we have thought of but AI enabling something catastrophic that we haven't thought of.

kazinator• 2 years ago

Government regulation is steered by lobby groups, so self regulation and government regulation are practically the same thing.

wittystick• 2 years ago

It's always about protectionism. No company wants the government interfering with its business. They want the government interfering in their upcoming competitor's businesses.

slowhadoken2• 2 years ago

Yeah you have to change how lobbying works. https://www.opensecrets.org/

Lerc4• 2 years ago

I don't really trust either to come up with good regulation policy. Industry would be biased towards their own interest and government lacks the expertise.

I think there is still an opportunity for government to implement regulation that meets the consensus of a variety of fields. This is not an easy problem to solve and I really think expecting any single person or organization would have the answer. Working together on a consensus for regulation would give the government a direction when currently they freely admit that they do not know what the right way is.

The problem I see is there are lots of points of view each trying to get something quickly that covers their specific area of focus. This does not seem like a pathway to robust regulation.

I assume there are discussions at the academic level of what would be a good response. Does anybody have a good link to what is being discussed at that level?

Is there any forum that covers good faith discussion involving industry, academia, and the public?

sherburt3• 2 years ago

Oh man I wish someone I trust would be in charge of this project. I know, let’s put bureaucrats in charge!

astrange10• 2 years ago

Works for Asia. The key is having good bureaucrats.

blackeyeblitzar2• 2 years ago

Anyone who says someone else can’t govern themselves is just looking to shift power into their own hands, or the hands of people they are aligned to. They never admit this but it’s the reality.

These former board members conducted themselves in such a poor way during the attempted ouster of Sam Altman, that they clearly cannot be trusted. Why is their opinion important to listen to?

Mind you - I don’t trust OpenAI or big tech companies either, mostly because of the amount of power or wealth they can accumulate. But I see that as a need to revise antitrust law. I am less onboard with trying to block people from developing models, since that to me is more like violating the right to thought and speech.

yareal• 2 years ago

Well, obviously, right? They started with the premise of, "what if we committed wholesale intellectual property theft" and moved immediately to, "I bet we can put a whole lot of people out of work and keep the profits to ourselves!"

It's astonishingly clear we need to regulate them.

whimsicalism9• 2 years ago

many people have tried regulating away “making profits out of putting people out of work”

it works out terribly for obvious and foreseen reasons

XorNot4• 2 years ago

The more interesting thing about LLMs at this point is their stunning success rate at psychologically attacking people.

We have this endless stream of "AGI imminent" claims and then ChatGPT-x still fails at some basic task everytime they release it.

trhway• 2 years ago

May be the AGI imitates the failures to avoid scaring humans into shutting it down that early before it took real power over the civilization. The Ender’s Game is definitely in the training set.

Osmium2• 2 years ago

What would regulation look like if it was based on energy usage rather than capabilities?

A guardrail on mass deployment that is not linked to specific model size or aspects of model performance that are difficult to quantify.

Lerc4• 2 years ago

Energy usage of training or inference?

As a guard on capabilities, it would permit a rise in abilities with gains in both hardware and software efficiency. Is this desirable?

Osmium2• 2 years ago

Overall energy usage, from the perspective that energy usage is the primary immediate harm of AI. This is a thesis, not an opinion.

dhfbshfbu4u3• 2 years ago

Archived version: https://archive.is/wbwC2

slowhadoken2• 2 years ago

Because commercial industry regulating itself has worked so well in the past?

JojoFatsani2• 2 years ago

Fun fact, McCauley is married to Joseph Gordon-Levitt.

genter• 2 years ago

And if you live in a cave like me, Joseph Gordon-Levitt is an actor.

JojoFatsani2• 2 years ago

Surely even nerds have seen Dark Knight Rises.

moose44• 2 years ago

Curious about past examples of industries and companies left to govern themselves?

maximus-decimus3• 2 years ago

Movie ratings. They censored themselves to avoid the government stepping in.

Also professional orders like engineers, accountants and teachers in some places I guess.

93po• 2 years ago

Film/TV ratings is a famously terrible, opaque process with no rhyme or reason to it at all, and everyone in hollywood hates it

andthenzen• 2 years ago

I'd look into industry trade groups and self-regulatory organizations. A few U.S. examples that come to mind are FINRA (broker-dealers), bar associations (lawyers), AMA (doctors), AICPA (accountants), etc.

hn_throwaway_995• 2 years ago

Really glad you brought up FINRA, as I think it's the model that will ultimately work best for AI regulation. Despite their protestations, FINRA is almost a "quasi-governmental" organization at this point. I think of it as the SEC being ultimately in charge, but FINRA is responsible for the nitty-gritty, technical details of the regulations.

I think with AI, you'll need an industry body because they'll have the needed AI knowledge and expertise about the technology itself, but ultimately a government oversight body carries the legal force of the state.

tbrownaw3• 2 years ago

Do things like lawn services and clothing shops count?

breakwaterlabs• 2 years ago

Lawyers, doctors, engineers, IT practitioners, the film industry,...

It's extremely common and has been for literally millenia.

patrickmay• 2 years ago

Underwriters Laboratories.

maroonblazer• 2 years ago

Video games via ESRB, PEGI, et al.

blackhawkC17• 2 years ago

Aren’t these two of the board members who lost their jobs due to sheer incompetence in handling the Sam Altman situation?

Of course they’re seeking power via the back door..

vundercind4• 2 years ago

My predictions:

1) AI stuff’s overblown. It’ll be a good tool, becoming just another of many, and probably will improve over time, but we’ll find we’re nowhere near as close to creating silicon sentience as some worry we are.

2) The real problem is letting a few megacorps raid the commons—and hell, lots of stuff that’s not really in the commons at all, basically just all of culture—then gate “their” creations behind a paywall (oh, but that they expect us to respect, because that makes sense), and these AI safety folks don’t seem to give a shit about that.

ronsor• 2 years ago

I agree with this.

On (2), I would like to see companies have no rights over models trained on public data. It's very arguable they should be required to release model weights.

vundercind4• 2 years ago

Yeah IMO a good outcome would be that training on data you don’t own or license should require release of the model. Is allowed, doesn’t get you something you exclusively own.

Bonus points if existing rights assignments aren’t enough to count as a grant of permission for AI training.

hn_throwaway_995• 2 years ago

then gate “their” creations behind a paywall (oh, but that they expect us to respect, because that makes sense), and these AI safety folks don’t seem to give a shit about that.

I downvoted your comment for this statement, given that's a specific worry discussed at length in this article.

vundercind4• 2 years ago

Ah, I figured since they’d been on the board of an org that did exactly that bad thing, on a grand scale, they couldn’t possibly seriously care about it. Maybe they were in very early and so briefly that they weren’t party to that.

IDK, article’s paywalled.

jamiek882• 2 years ago

and these AI safety folks don’t seem to give a shit about that

Because that’s literally not their job or role. Why would enforcing copyright be in any way shape or form their responsibility?

astrange10• 2 years ago

Legal safety is (part of) the reason companies have "trust and safety" teams.

The problem here is that AI training is probably not actually a copyright issue, some people just wish it was and are trying to manifest one by complaining.

(Similar things exist in online artist communities with rules like "no reposting without crediting the artist" - they think if they just keep telling everyone this is the rule it'll become one.)

N0b8ez• 2 years ago

silicon sentience

Sentience is the ability to have experiences like pain and tasting sweetness. People usually use the word "sapient" or terms like AGI to describe an AI with advanced reasoning ability. This might sound like nitpicking since I was still able to understand your meaning, but the distinction between sentience/sapience is a useful one to keep around and preserve in common usage, at least for the sake of ethics (e.g. a newborn baby isn't sapient, but is sentient).

felipeerias2• 2 years ago

There is little doubt that AI will be a successful technology. Ultimately, it will be able to create computers that are a lot more aware of the context in which they are used and which are much better at processing large amounts of unstructured human-made information. Personally, I find that the talk about AGI mainly serves as a marketing pitch, as well as providing an excuse for trampling over existing regulations.

The second point is much more worrying. In the near future, the amount of plausibly-human content generated by machines will dwarf the actually-human content created by real people.

Right now, people reading this comment will assume by default that it has been written by a real person. It might not be long until that default assumption changes.

whimsicalism9• 2 years ago

I find it entertaining to see ML skeptics retreat in their rhetorical stances in real time.

I remember what people were saying in 2022. Now in 2024, it has become the leftist anti-corporate position to favor strict enforcement of copyright law.

vundercind4• 2 years ago

I’m also cool with none. But the worst case is “strict application of copyright for the little people… mass-scale ripping-off of the little people by rich people”.

__loam6• 2 years ago

Thank you for considering the over exploitation of the commons.

hn_throwaway_995• 2 years ago

After everything I've seen in the time since Altman's ouster then reinstatement at OpenAI, I would definitely admit I was wrong in my original assessment of the board's actions. While I still think how they went about it was both naive and very poorly executed, everything I've read online (both from the board members but, more importantly, from others in-the-know at OpenAI) makes me believe their action was warranted, especially given the stated function of the OpenAI board.

I've never met Sam Altman, but the last "straw" for me was the recent Scarlett Johansson brouhaha. While I think it's pretty clear they wanted their AI system to evoke Johansson's persona in the movie, OpenAI would have at least had some level of plausible deniability if it weren't for Altman's 3-letter "her" tweet. It's like he just couldn't help himself - it seemed the embodiment of these "tech boy-princes" who, despite all their often lauded "genius", just seem incapable of shutting TFU.

I honestly don't mean to solely dump on Altman (see also Musk, Andreessen, etc.), it's just that he's obviously a focus of this article. But everything I've heard about nearly every other tech billionaire makes me think I absolutely do not want them independently in charge of humanity's future with AI.

prox• 2 years ago

Why do these figures all have like this immature thing about them?

greenchair• 2 years ago

just part of being a sociopath

hn_throwaway_995• 2 years ago

My theory is that we're all pretty much that immature, but the rest of us have normal societal guardrails confirming that we're not actually as special and smart as we think we are.

But these tech bros and others with that much power have no such societal constraints. And, importantly, they did have huge impacts on society: creating the first popular Internet browser, jumpstarting the EV revolution, exposing the masses to AI - these all really were enormous accomplishments. So it's not that hard to go from there to convincing yourself that your shit don't stink and that you have some unique insight into all areas of human existence.

csense• 2 years ago

In order to get to this kind of place, you have to pass three filters:

- Your org must be big / famous

- You must be the public face of your org

- You have an irresistable urge to say edgy things you probably shouldn't

People who are comfortable with their place in life are less likely to make it through this filter.

felipeerias2• 2 years ago

Altman's "her" tweet gathered 21 million impressions and tend of thousands of likes and retweets. It must be hard to remain sane and equanimous when you can command that level of attention with just three letters.

diego_sandoval2• 2 years ago

Your whole argument about the Johannson issue depends on the presumption that OpenAI will end up being the loser in the legal battle or in the court of public opinion.

I think OpenAI will end up winning the legal battle. The voice is not similar enough to Johannson's for her to win.

On the court of public opinion, OpenAI will lose trust from a small portion of the population, but for the rest of the world, it's not gonna matter at all. The positive impact of "OpenAI just made the movie Her a reality" is bigger than the negative impact.

XorNot4• 2 years ago

Also that a product seeming "dangerous" makes it seem more effective when you're trying to sell it. You see this all the time - it's why "military-grade" gets tossed on every random consumer gadget in regards to some specification.

It's why if I told you my showerhead's pressure makes it illegal to buy locally, you'd think "ooh that's probably a really good showerhead" (yes I made this up, yes I was thinking of Seinfeld when I did).

whimsicalism9• 2 years ago

I have mixed feelings about all the recent controversy and coverage. But frankly if the ScarJo thing was at all significant in how you assess OAI or x-risk, I’m somewhat inclined to discount the opinion.

talldayo2• 2 years ago

I'm inclined to discount opinions that include "x-risk" as a serious talking point.

z7• 2 years ago

Tasha McCauley holds a B.A. from Bard College and a master of Business Administration from the University of South California.
Helen Toner holds an MA in Security Studies from Georgetown, as well as a BSc in Chemical Engineering and a Diploma in Languages from the University of Melbourne.

So these are the AI experts...?

mistrial9• 2 years ago

there is a tsunami of publicity on this topic, going for months on end.. This short exposition bubbles up to the front page of YNews. Reading it you can see that it quickly moves from "AI Companies are doing this.." to direct anecdotes about OpenAI and their infamous origin of being totally helpful and open. Sum the parts with those bios you point out, and you can see that this is intellectually shallow waters with young companies spoken by young voices. Why jump on that harsh interpretation? evidence is in the choice of seatbelts in Dept of Transportation regs to compare to safety. What meatspace regulations are adequate metaphor for what is going on in digital transaction space.? really not showing any effort by the authors, and confirming that this is a made-for-headline news level essay.

sh1mmer• 2 years ago

Sam Altman holds.. no degree? So presumably using their academic qualifications as a basis for their eligibility for the board of OpenAI is as silly as using Mr Altman’s?

Would you give him the benefit of the doubt as an “AI expert” because of his well know work experience at YC? Without discussing their careers at all this comment seems at best unhelpful.

reducesuffering• 2 years ago

Why don't you read some of Helen's papers and make a more informed analysis? https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=NNnQg0MAAAAJ&hl=en

robwwilliams• 2 years ago

This commentary strikes the right balance between necessary/inevitable progress toward AGI and one or more common goods (however you define that—-even as a libertarian).

The other more difficult question though is behind the screen—-how do we achieve the right balance between what we believe is the common good? How will we (liberal democratic belief systems) evaluate our version of the common good against other versions of the common good: what “they” (autocratic, theocratic, …) believe is the common good?

No one society/culture can rationally adjudicate this decision or make any decisions stick.

Unfortunately this has already become yet another version of “warfare by other means”.

I personally hope that a pragmatic inclusive liberal democratic tradition gains a strong upper hand. I want my AGI to read and embed J Dewey, Gh Mead, J Rawls, J Habermas, O Dasgupta, RA Posner, and R Rorty.

But here will inevitably be battles among AGI systems, perhaps on behalf of one or another human culture; perhaps not. Both scenarios are equally frightening. The Chinese proverb of “living in interesting times” applies in force.

motohagiography2• 2 years ago

even though I see the existential concerns with AI, I was at the table with a group of ISPs for the same governance conversations about the internet in the mid 90s and probably still have an RSA encryption munitions t-shirt in a box somewhere.

what got bypassed was telco and ITU regulation, and the internet demolished the "converged" telco oligopoly system on content and publishing pretty naturally and in a fairly controlled way. given the impact of social media, could similar governance as is being advocated here have enabled the growth and whole new economies the way the platforms have? I don't see it.

the people who ostensibly require your consent to serve you are the absolute last people you want to give control of powerful economic tools to, as first, what would they need your consent for if they have the tools, and since they don't actually make anything, by definition these people exist to optimize for solving zero-sum, closed loop problems in their own decision power and for redistribution to their coalitions. they do not -and will not- use AI to create the things that grow. charitably, governors and managers can be the shit from which things grow, but we are not in a shit shortage.

imo, governance is the antithesis of desire. open source everything, build everything, release everything as fast as you can because these are the same old people who wanted cryptography backdoored, the internet content policed, speech punished, and now AI controlled. every generation must find a way to thrive in spite of them.

m463• 2 years ago

there must be a happy medium between daily tps reports and and a no-privacy gig economy.

I think the answer is always checks and balances. And some things should be purposefully ambiguous, like "high crimes and misdemeanors".

motohagiography2• 2 years ago

sort of interesting on the always part, as I don't think the failure mode of it is acceptable or desirable, where someone whose default is always to have checks/balances is ok with it because presumably they benefit.

the alternative to checks and balances is the freedom to defect, exit, repurpose, optimize, compete, reinterpret, etc. we can always invent moderation schemes. even though I think the effect of unregulated social media has been existentially bad for western societies, most of the regulatory state seems pretty happy about the outcome. who could have predicted that all most people really wanted was to deliver food and do soft peepshow sex work while they raged about their outgroups and waited for their 15mins of fame? ugly and messy, but it's what we wanted.

The one group you don't want to help are the ones who are actuated by having power over others. It's a sick kink, and the only thing that has kept them at bay so far has been the high bar of competence for math and code. AI changes that, and depriving good people of powerful tools by restricting them to the hands of regulators means only the worst people will have them. Open sourcing everything to take away any moats they may have seems more urgent than ever.

raxxorraxor• 2 years ago

every generation must find a way to thrive in spite of them.

Let's hope so. There is a value of having a critical perspective on developments, especially in tech if potential gets mixed up with blind advertising. But there has not been any constructive developments regarding internet technology in the last two decades on a policy level.

We got security theatre and surveillance demanded by an old and scared population and you have to always be as vigilant against misdirected politics as you are on any attacks.

whimsicalism9• 2 years ago

I absolutely agree, but don’t think the solution is self-labeled policy experts from the east coast chattering classes in DC, NYC, and Boston.

People involved in the governance need to be conversant in the tech itself.

rjvs• 2 years ago

I don’t think that there is anything in the article that disagrees with this.

ein0p8• 2 years ago

Nation state governments are responsible for the vast majority of deaths attributable to violence historically. Willingly entrusting them with a potentially world ending technology that they’re 100% certain to abuse is a moronic idea.

ZhadruOmjar• 2 years ago

This whole thing seems like a way to build a regulatory framework so only the existing, largest AI players can continue and there is too much regulation for anyone else to enter the industry.

ein0p8• 2 years ago

Pretty much. I hope we at least get some trillion parameter GPT4 grade FOSS models before they inevitably succeed in regulating linear algebra.

thrance2• 2 years ago

Would it have been better if nuclear weapons had been developed by a private company whose board consisted entirely of lunatics?

ein0p8• 2 years ago

The “responsible” US government proceeded immediately to nuking a bunch of civilians in two cities, narrowly sparing Kyoto. So the answer to that question doesn’t seem clear cut to me. Do realize that you’re putting lunatics in charge in either case, but governments have unlimited budgets and monopoly on violence.

0xfaded• 2 years ago

That's pretty much the idea, that governments have a monopoly on the use of force. The last 80 years have been unusually peaceful by historical standards. My guess is that the crumbling of governments will lead to more human deaths.

__loam6• 2 years ago

People who say the UN failed have no idea what they're talking about.

__loam6• 2 years ago

Nobody has nuked anyone since Nagasaki so you're not exactly batting a hundred here bud. I'll take flawed democracy over authoritarian corporate self governance any day of the week. Many of the leaders in the valley have repeatedly shown that they are some of the worst people in the country.

ein0p8• 2 years ago

The mere fact that USG nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki should have put a permanent black mark on its credibility and “hingedness”. Why this is in any way controversial idk. Literally a hundred thousand civilians were killed for no military gain whatsoever. Japan was already done fighting at that point

gmerc2• 2 years ago

Let’s give it to Elon instead. /s

ein0p8• 2 years ago

Unironically that might be the best available option

perkolator• 2 years ago

"Better yet, we should give it to me and my friends.

I promise we are just morally superior and better people in my unbiased opinion."

edanm• 2 years ago

Humans are responsible for 100% of deaths attributable to violence. So how about we do our best to keep any humans from getting a world-ending technology?

stuaxo• 2 years ago

Sam Altman just comes across so sneezy that it's impossible to take anything they say in good faith, so Id assume this comes from a place of suppressing competitors.

AI firms mustn’t govern themselves, say ex-members of OpenAI’s board

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