Thoughts on the “pause advanced AI” petition
A utopian consideration
The news of 1,000+ prominent tech leaders asking for a six month moratorium brings up some important considerations.
Feasibility of legislation
Legislative branch’s technical capabilities: our senators showed in testimonies that they have little to no understanding of what Facebook does and how it operates.
There’s no regulation of internet privacy, collecting and reselling consumer data based on browsing, or having babies via surrogacy. Will AI be legislated? Fat chance.
Likelihood of this being enacted: hell will freeze over before this happens. (Hell, Michigan actually froze over this past year.)
Would this be a good idea? There could be a lot of upside.
Pros
How much consideration was given at Facebook that their platform would be used to enable genocide in places such as Myanmar?
How much are internet firms concerned about privacy?
How many companies put consumer welfare at the forefront? Consider cell phones that end up spontaneously combusting because they were released before adequate testing was performed.
There are likely implications we can’t even fathom that haven’t been thought through yet.
Cons
Who gets to be the decider? What if most, but not all, organizations pause and then a punk competitor decides to race ahead, come hell or high water.
Organizations that might rely on grants or have time limits to their funding could close up, theoretically robbing the world of the important work they (would have been) doing.
Does all research and implementation need to stop, or can considerations be integrated with upgraded technologies?
Unemployment
This seems to be the most accurate concern. Why pay someone if a computer can do it faster and for a minimal cost? An imperfect analogy would be Rust Belt towns that were devastated when trade was liberalized and the government did little to nothing to prepare or mitigate the effects.
My coworkers were immediately worried when I demonstrated how ChatGPT can do a good chunk of lesson planning, scenario ideation, and organization. Their response was, “we are all going to be out of jobs!” My response was, “now I can focus on the creative work I actually like to do!”
Universal Basic Income can be somewhat of a mitigation, funded by increased productivity from AI.
