This idea kind of rhymes with gain-of-function research in a way that makes me uncomfortable. "Let's intentionally create harmful things, but its OK because we are creating harmful things for the purpose of preventing the harm that would be caused by those things."
I'm not sure if I can formalize this into a logically-tight case against doing it, but it seems conceptually similar to X, and X is bad.
That's fair enough and a good point.
I think that the key difference is that in the case of profitable-but-bad technologies, someone, somewhere, will probably invent them because there's great incentive to do so.
In the case of gain-of-function, if there stops being grants and the academics who do it become pariahs, then the incentive to do the gain-of-function research is gone.
A bit of a tangent, but economist Alex Tabarrok has talked about buying coal mines in order to not mine coal
One of the challenges until recently (as outlined in that link) was:
There are also some crazy “use it or lose it” laws that say that you can’t buy the right to extract a natural resource and not use it. When the high-bidder for an oil and gas lease near Arches National Park turned out to be an environmentalist the BLM cancelled the contract!
I’m pretty sure there’s no such use it or lose it law for patents, since patent trolls already exist.
Patenting an invention necessarily discloses the invention to the public. (In fact, incentivizing disclosure was the rationale for the creation of the patent system.) That is a little worrying because the main way the non-AI tech titans (large corporations) have protected themselves from patent suits has been to obtain their own patent portfolios, then entering into cross-licensing agreements with the holders of the other patent portfolios. Ergo, the patent-trolling project you propose could incentivize the major labs to disclose inventions that they are currently keeping secret, which of course would be bad.
Although patent trolling is a better use of money IMHO than most of things designed to reduce AI extinction risk that have been funded so far, lobbying the US and UK governments to nationalize their AI labs is probably better because a government program can be a lot more strict than a private organization can be in prohibiting researchers and engineers from sharing insights and knowledge outside the program. In particular, if the nationalized program is sufficiently like top-secret defense programs, long prison sentences are the penalty for a worker to share knowledge outside of the program.
Also, note that the patent troll needs to be well-funded (with a warchest of 100s of millions of dollars preferably) before it starts to influence the behavior of the AI labs although if it starts out with less and gets lucky, it might in time manage to get the needed warchest by winning court cases or arriving at settlements with the labs.
The non-AI parts of the tech industry have been dealing with patent trolls since around 1980 and although technologists certainly complain about these patent trolls, I've never seen any indication that anyone has been completely demoralized by them and we do not see young talented people proclaim that they're not going to go into tech because of the patent trolls. Nationalization of AI research in contrast strikes me as having the potential to completely demoralize a significant fraction of AI researchers and put many talented young people off of the career path although I admit it will also tend to make the career path more appealing to some young people.
Both interventions (patent trolling and lobbying for nationalization) are just ways to slow down the AI juggernaut, buying us a little time to luck into some more permanent solution.
Your argument about corporate secrets is sufficient to change my mind on activist patent trolling being a productive strategy against AI X-risk.
The part about funding would need to be solved with philanthropy. I don't believe that org exists, but I don't see why it couldn't.
I'm still curious whether there are other cases in which activist patent trolling can be a good option, such as animal welfare, chemistry, public health, or geoengineering (ie fracking).
As a quirk of the US patent system, patenting an idea doesn't actually require implementing it or proving that the implementation works. As a result, if you want to try this, you should patent ideas that seem good or bad to you in a scattershot manner, but should not do the actual underlying capabilities research. Then, you get to sue if someone else independently comes up with the patented idea and actually finds success with it, but you don't contribute to actual capabilities advances any more than an ideas guy posting to /r/singularity.
(Source: I have actually patented a thing, but do not really endorse this decision and haven't sued anyone about it. I am not a patent lawyer)
(Epistemic status: I know next to nothing about patent law, I'm just sharing some thoughts. I would love to be corrected by someone knowledgeable.)
If you think that some technology has a significant chance of ending the world (or having other huge negative externalities that outweigh the benefits), you might wish to postpone that technology. Convincing regulators or pressuring companies not to use a technology are two ways, but could another be to develop the technology first, patent it, and go to court to prevent anyone from using it?
A quick search couldn't find any examples of inventors doing this, though there are plenty of inventors who regret their inventions. There's an alternate history where the inventors of vaping or pop up ads realized that their inventions, although technically legal and extremely profitable, would cause huge harm, patented them, and prevented any copycats.
If activist patent trolls can exist, then supporting them can be a hugely beneficial thing to do. By definition, an activist patent troll must:
Both of these qualities make activist patent trolls among the best decision makers when it comes to the future of technology. I look forward to hearing your thoughts on the political philosophy of ethicotechnotrollocracy.[1]
Activist patent trolls can contribute substantially to every major Effective Altruism priority:
Issues with activist patent trolling:
What can be done now?
ethical (ethico), skill/craft/expertise (techno), troll rule (trollocracy)
Assuming that Flash Attention can be patented. Software patent law is tricky. Is "Flash Attention" an 'abstract idea' (cannot be patented) or 'a product of engineering' (can be patented)?
Again, assuming it is an option. I’m no expert in patent law.