[Edit: I've updated this post on October 24 in response to some feedback]
NIMBYs don’t call themselves NIMBYs. They call themselves affordable housing advocates or community representatives or environmental campaigners. They’re usually not against building houses. They just want to make sure that those houses are affordable, attractive to existing residents, and don’t destroy habitat for birds and stuff.
Who can argue with that? If, ultimately, those demands stop houses from being built entirely, well, that’s because developers couldn’t find a way to build them without hurting poor people, local communities, or birds and stuff.
This is called politics and it’s powerful. The most effective anti-housebuilding organisation in the UK doesn’t call itself Pause Housebuilding. It calls itself the Campaign to Protect Rural England, because English people love rural England. CPRE campaigns in the 1940s helped shape England’s planning system. As a result, permission to build houses is only granted when it’s in the “public interest”; in practice it is given infrequently and often with onerous conditions.[1]
The AI pause folks could learn from their success. Instead of campaigning for a total halt to AI development, they could push for strict regulations that aim to ensure new AI systems won’t harm people (or birds and stuff).
This approach has two advantages. First, it’s more politically palatable than a heavy-handed pause. And second, it’s closer to what those of us concerned about AI safety ideally want: not an end to progress, but progress that is safe and advances human flourishing.
I think NIMBYs happen to be wrong about the cost-benefit calculation of strong regulation. But AI safety people are right. Advanced AI systems pose grave threats and we don’t know how to mitigate them.
Maybe ask governments for an equivalent system for new AI models. Require companies to prove to planners their models are safe. Ask for:
- Independent safety audits
- Ethics reviews
- Economic analyses
- Public reports on risk analysis and mitigation measures
- Compensation mechanisms for people whose livelihoods are disrupted by automation
- And a bunch of other measures that plausibly limit the AI risks
In practice, these requirements might be hard to meet. But, considering the potential harms and meaningful chance something goes wrong, they should be. If a company developing an unprecedentedly large AI model with surprising capabilities can’t prove it’s safe, they shouldn’t release it.
This is not about pausing AI.
I don’t know anybody who thinks AI systems have zero upside. In fact, the same people worried about the risks are often excited about the potential for advanced AI systems to solve thorny coordination problems, liberate billions from mindless toil, achieve wonderful breakthroughs in medicine, and generally advance human flourishing.
But they’d like companies to prove their systems are safe before they release them into the world, or even train them at all. To prove that they’re not going to cause harm by, for example, hurting people, disrupting democratic institutions, or wresting control of important sociopolitical decisions from human hands.
Who can argue with that?
[Edit: Peter McIntyre has pointed out that Ezra Klein made a version of this argument on the 80K podcast. So I've been scooped - but at least I'm in good company!]
- ^
“Joshua Carson, head of policy at the consultancy Blackstock, said: “The notion of developers ‘sitting on planning permissions’ has been taken out of context. It takes a considerable length of time to agree the provision of new infrastructure on strategic sites for housing and extensive negotiation with councils to discharge planning conditions before homes can be built.”” (Kollewe 2021)
Sadly I couldn't respond to this post two weeks ago but here I go.
First of all I'm not sure I understand your position, but I think that you believe that if we push for other types of regulation either:
I'm confused between the two because you write
That I understand as you believing we don't have know those measures right now, but you also write
That if we agree there's no way to prove it then you're pretty much talking about a pause.
If your point is the first one I would disagree with it and I think even OpenAI when they say we don't know yet how to align a SI.
If your point is the second one, then my problem with that is that I don't think that would give us close to the same amount of time than a pause. Also it could make most people believe risks from AI, including X-risks, are safeguarded now, and we could lose support because of that. And all of that would lead to more money in the industry that could lead to regulatory capture recursively.
All of that is also related to
Which I'm not sure that it's true. Of course this depends a lot in how much you think that the current work on alignment is close to being enough to make us safe. Are we going parallel enough to the precipice that we'll be able to reach or steer in time to reach an utopia? Or are we going towards it and we will have some brief progress before falling? Would that be closer to the ideal? Anyways, the ideal is the enemy of the good or the truth or something.
Lastly, after arguing why a pause would be a lot better than other regulations, I'll give you that of course it would be harder to get/ less "politically palatable" which is arguably the main point of the post. But I don't how many orders of magnitude. With a pause you win over people who think safer AI isn't enough or it's just marketing from the biggest companies and nations. And also, talking about marketing, I think pausing AI is a slogan that can draw a lot more attention, which I think is good given that most people seem to want regulation.