Meditations on Moloch in the AI Rat Race
This post is cross-posted from our Substack. Kindly read the description of this sequence to understand the context in which this was written. The rat race to better and better generative AI systems is a real one. Companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google Deepmind have a shared goal: creating “benevolent AGI”. The problem is that not a single one of these companies is currently on track to reach this goal; at least the “benevolent” part. The reason being? Moloch They might all want to slow down to focus more on safety concerns, but they can’t. Why? Moloch They might all want to spend more of their investor’s money to focus on safety concerns, but they can’t. Why? Moloch More than ten years ago, Scott Alexander wrote a phenomenal essay titled “Meditations On Moloch”. Moloch is intro duced as an answer to one of C.S. Lewis’ questions: What does it? Scott writes, “Earth could be fair, and all men glad and wise. Instead we have prisons, smokestacks, asylums. What sphinx of cement and aluminum breaks open their skulls and eats up their imagination?” And Allen Ginsberg’s famous poem on Moloch answers it: > What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination? > > Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks! > > Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men! > > Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments! > > Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb! >
This seems like a way to potentially positively impact legislation on agentic AI: CAISI Issues Request for Information About Securing AI Agent Systems | NIST. I'll definitely be filling this in.
"The Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI) at the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has published a Request for Information (RFI) seeking insights from industry, academia, and the security community regarding the secure development and deployment of AI agent systems."
"The RFI poses questions on topics including:
- Unique security threats affecting AI agent systems, and how these threats may change over time.
- Methods for improving the security of AI agent systems in development and deployment.
- Promise of and possible gaps in
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