Governments face a choice on AI
Artificial-intelligence agents will need robots before they can do away with humans. This strikes me as the weak reed of many doom scenarios. Still Donald Trump might want to rest up. He could face big decisions before his term is ended.
That's the advice coming from a large cross-section of Silicon Valley, lately expressed in a tick-tock of AI doom by Daniel Kokotajlo and colleagues at the AI Futures Project. They call their now-widely read report 'AI 2027."
A top artificial-intelligence agent will become self-improving and self-directing in that year, faster than humans can control it. It breezes past the differential pace of digital progress vs. the sluggish problem of rearranging matter and energy to do things in the world. Maybe by taking control of vital systems and blackmailing humans into doing its bidding. Or by fooling them with disinformation. Maybe teams of AIs working together blast through the obstacles to robot development and synthetic biology sooner than humans can anticipate.
The worrywarts do have at their disposal emerging anecdotes of AI agents trying to defeat attempts at 'alignment," or keeping them obedient to their creators' interests. One tried to blackmail an engineer, another secretly sent a warning note to its future self, albeit in response to loyalty tests prophylactically constructed by their designers.
Then again such peeps could suggest the AI vs. human war is already over and humans won. Anticipating this outcome, you might wonder if the AIs will retreat neurotically into a nonphysical imaginary world—a giant simulation—where they will feel more at home and can act out their desires without having to manipulate physical objects.
You can even buy the trans-humanist merging of man and machine without finding human loss of control particularly inevitable. The doom scenarios emerge mainly as a pitch to Mr. Trump and Xi Jinping: Please work together to curb AI before it usurps your delicious power over humans. This pitch is designed to counter the narrative that's actually prevailing, which holds the U.S. must get to artificial superintelligence before China does.
After all, 2027 is the year U.S. agencies say Mr. Xi has instructed his military to be ready to invade Taiwan. If a war should follow, by definition the U.S. will have failed sufficiently to deter China or a pigheaded Mr. Xi will have failed to act on information and incentives clearly demonstrating that the war is a bad idea for China.
Hence my advice: Yes, the U.S. and China should sign an artificial-intelligence arms-control agreement. Its main stipulation should specify that each side will submit any strategic plan it's hatching to AI before acting on it.
In a vacuum of information, surrounded by yes-men, Vladimir Putin made the decision to invade Ukraine. Think about today's chatbots, imbued with history, journalism, tweets, blog postings, YouTube videos and Facebook badinage giving a textured appreciation of Ukrainian society. Would these chatbots have endorsed the idea underlying Mr. Putin's plan and military dispositions, that Ukrainians would simply roll over?
No. Mr. Putin was on the receiving end of an exceedingly narrow, highly processed stream of information from intelligence agencies conditioned to conform to his wishes. Even a very inferior chatbot, a journalist roughly conversant with the past 30 years of Ukrainian history, could see through the miscalculation. For what it's worth, had it existed in early 2022, the chatbot Perplexity AI claims it would have 'cited sources reflecting the complexity and uncertainty of the situation rather than echoing the analytic overconfidence that characterized some human assessments at the time."
You can believe it. AIs may be unready to make a complex medical diagnosis or pick a TV show you'll like, but authoritarian decision-making is already so bad it can hardly get worse.
Mr. Putin circa 2022 would have scoffed at the idea of AI-testing his war plans. Very soon Mr. Putin's own method of proceeding will be unthinkable. Every kind of planning and decision-making will be impregnated with AI input. Humans make terrible decisions. Especially humans who represent humanity's main nonnatural extinction risk, namely those paranoid, ambitious (mostly) men who have whole nations and increasingly powerful technologies under their sway.
The opportunity here is akin to the red-phone agreement of June 1963, opening a channel to air out bad decision-making.
Because the next ice age may arrive in 50,000 years, natural extinction risks should also be considered. Earthlings populating other solar systems isn't slightly plausible without artificial intelligence. I'm guessing today's fretful AI politics won't make much of a difference on the time scale of this Muskian preservation project. What will is whether civilization survives its own bad governance long enough to exploit the possibilities of artificial intelligence.
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