AI is not very regulated. For instance, Max Tegmark notes that AI is less regulated than a sandwich shop in the US. This seems kind of wild for an industry where most relevant scientists think there is a serious chance of it destroying humanity. Even for something that occasionally encourages children to kill themselves. Shouldn’t it at least be as regulated as paroxetine?
The kinds of things I hear people say about why it shouldn’t be regulated I think mostly apply to everything—’technology is usually good on net’, ‘the government might not be able to regulate it well’ etc. So why in fact is this so unusually unregulated?
I speculate that the real reason AI isn’t very regulated is that it’s on computers, and regulating the motion of numbers on computers feels unnatural to most people. We have already seen that the world of software and the internet is a much freer place than the physical world. That’s one thing I like about it—I can just set up shop and write blog posts without even having to acquire a blogging permit. People have intuitions that ideas, information, thoughts should be free, and aren’t really real anyway, and can’t really do anything on their own. Are you seriously going to regulate the doing of math? Even wanting to seems kind of absurd—both hopeless and overcontrolling.
But if you do work in a virtual world, you do work in real life. These intuitions of the unreality and passivity of virtual things are wrong, and once the ‘ideas’ and ‘information’ become elaborate calculations that change the real world, their wrongness starts to get intense. We already live in a reality where physical things constantly move as a result of virtual activity. And while we’ve regulated a few virtual areas for this reason (for instance things that involve money or Europe), I’d say we haven’t reckoned with this much yet: the virtual worlds we have created in recent decades remain a wild west, with the help of our intuitions that they should be.
As David has pointed out to me: imagine if companies were breeding new biological entities that were already as capable as humans at many tasks—would the world be responding in remotely the same way? Would that be unregulated? Why is it different on computers?
I think this might change soon—as the impetus for important real world occurrences starts to come from patterns on computers, I think virtual worlds might rapidly start to feel like the proper realm of government control. Ideally we would make that adjustment before we start to pay a lot of costs for the error.
GPT 3 came out in 2020. I think it is the default for six year old technologies to be completely unregulated, and does not require any specific explanation.
I speculate that the real reason AI isn’t very regulated is that it’s on computers, and regulating the motion of numbers on computers feels unnatural to most people
I think a lot of people, including in government, think it is snake oil. they last tried a chatbot > 6 months ago and were unimpressed. it is still the basis of their understanding. to them it is a toy, a curio. regulating it would be like regulating a circus or a science fiction movie. this disconnect is only going to get worse as the rate of improvement increases.
AI is not very regulated. For instance, Max Tegmark notes that AI is less regulated than a sandwich shop in the US. This seems kind of wild for an industry where most relevant scientists think there is a serious chance of it destroying humanity. Even for something that occasionally encourages children to kill themselves. Shouldn’t it at least be as regulated as paroxetine?
The kinds of things I hear people say about why it shouldn’t be regulated I think mostly apply to everything—’technology is usually good on net’, ‘the government might not be able to regulate it well’ etc. So why in fact is this so unusually unregulated?
I speculate that the real reason AI isn’t very regulated is that it’s on computers, and regulating the motion of numbers on computers feels unnatural to most people. We have already seen that the world of software and the internet is a much freer place than the physical world. That’s one thing I like about it—I can just set up shop and write blog posts without even having to acquire a blogging permit. People have intuitions that ideas, information, thoughts should be free, and aren’t really real anyway, and can’t really do anything on their own. Are you seriously going to regulate the doing of math? Even wanting to seems kind of absurd—both hopeless and overcontrolling.
But if you do work in a virtual world, you do work in real life. These intuitions of the unreality and passivity of virtual things are wrong, and once the ‘ideas’ and ‘information’ become elaborate calculations that change the real world, their wrongness starts to get intense. We already live in a reality where physical things constantly move as a result of virtual activity. And while we’ve regulated a few virtual areas for this reason (for instance things that involve money or Europe), I’d say we haven’t reckoned with this much yet: the virtual worlds we have created in recent decades remain a wild west, with the help of our intuitions that they should be.
As David has pointed out to me: imagine if companies were breeding new biological entities that were already as capable as humans at many tasks—would the world be responding in remotely the same way? Would that be unregulated? Why is it different on computers?
I think this might change soon—as the impetus for important real world occurrences starts to come from patterns on computers, I think virtual worlds might rapidly start to feel like the proper realm of government control. Ideally we would make that adjustment before we start to pay a lot of costs for the error.