Re:Contra Marc Andreessen on AI
by SilverBirch on Wednesday June 14, 2023 @05:35AM
(#36323507)
On that second point... haven't we kind of solved this? Or rather there's a really obvious parallel. We've got an extremely powerful thing that can do whatever we want it to do, and now all we need to do is decide what to ask it to do and make sure it does what we want. Where else do we see that? Well that's government. The US is a massively powerful country, it's got hundreds of thousands of soldiers, billions of dollars at it's disposable, it can shoot individual humans into the sun if it wants to -and it's intelligent too! So how do we control it? A set of institutions with checks and balances elected by and accountable to the public.
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But stable/self-constrained governments require consensus to operate. They doesn’t just ask politely and prefer it. Checks and balances are preserved not because all the parties are interested in preserving them overall, but because they each want their own power not to be impeded. The systems that can’t achieve this balancing act fall over after a while, and this happens very frequently (99.999% of governments in history?).
Nuclear MAD produces a similar equilibrium but this is stable due to specific characteristics of nuclear weapons and their delivery systems (expensive to produce; almost impossible to produce, test, or use secretly; impossible to reliably intercept). We shouldn’t bet on AI development reaching the same equilibrium.