A TIME article published recently calls for an “indefinite and worldwide” moratorium on new large AI training runs.

This moratorium would be better than no moratorium. I have respect for the author who wrote it. It’s an improvement on the margin.

I refrained from endorsing the essay because I think it is understating the seriousness of the situation and asking for too little to solve it.

If there was a plan for Earth to survive, if only we passed an indefinite and worldwide moratorium on large training runs, I would back that plan. There isn’t any such plan.

Here’s what would actually need to be done:

All human technology needs to be destroyed. There can be no exceptions, including for sharpened stones and hand axes. After everything is burned, we must then forget how to create fire. If a single exception is made, that increases the probability that civilization will be recreated within the next millennia and new large AI training runs will be started. If I had infinite freedom to write laws, I might carve out a single exception for technologies that prevent human diseases, like knowledge of germ theory; but if that was remotely complicating the issue I would immediately jettison that proposal and say to just shut it all down.

Shut down all the roads, melt all the cars. Burn down all of the tables and all of the books. Put a ceiling into how many calories of food any single human can furnish per day, and move it downward over the coming generations to compensate for the possibility that natural selection will keep making humans smarter. No exceptions for cloth or fireplaces. Destroy all human objects now to prevent them from moving to another country. Track all gazelles that are hunt. If anyone notices that a tribe is catching more gazelles than it should, be willing to choke them (with your bare hands, of course) one by one.

Shut it all down. Eliminate all technology. Dismantle modern civilization. Return to our primeval state.

We are not ready. We are not on track to be significantly readier any time in the next million years. If we go ahead on this, everyone will suffer, including children who did not choose this and did not do anything wrong.

Shut it down.

Dog on a porch

Dog on a porch