
How can policy keep up with AI advances? - robertwiblin
https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/openai-askell-brundage-clark-latest-in-ai-policy-and-strategy/
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currymj
I miss the days when it was unfashionable to call things "AI".

It forced people to think more clearly, and it made the models used sound to
normal people like boring applications of numerical optimization, which is
pretty accurate. It's not something a normal person should feel any sense of
excitement about, any more than they should care about a new type of satellite
dish or whatever -- you have to be a pretty odd duck to find it intrinsically
interesting.

~~~
jjcm
AI is definitely a loaded word. We have years upon years of built up fictional
worlds created on the basis of a dystopian future put in place by AI gone
wrong. It's understandable - AI is an enemy that no country will be offended
by (as opposed to say, Goldeneye, which vilifies Russia), is unknown enough
that suspension of disbelief is easy, and allows for an easy plot device.

Sadly, the decisions around AI will likely be based on those pieces of
fiction. The average person has spent more time watching movies about AI
rather than reading actual research material on it, and will vote accordingly.
We should really refrain from using "AI" as a term until artificial general
intelligence is actually upon us. Using it to refer to GANs or Deep
Convolutional Networks is just feeding the news beast.

In addition to changing the terminology though, I think it's also important to
change the fiction as well. Project Hieroglyph[1] is one of my favourite
efforts in the realm of fiction - it aims to combine scientific papers with
fictional stories that represent those advances in a clear and accurate way.
If people are going to make decisions based on fiction, we should at least
keep the fiction accountable to being realistic and accurate.

[1] [https://hieroglyph.asu.edu/](https://hieroglyph.asu.edu/)

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snrji
It's very simple: do NOT legislate. Stop regulating every single detail.
Instead, focus on making sure that the fundamental principles (fundamental
rights, trade...) are respected. Those principles will probably be the same in
30 years than they were 50 years ago, or at least very similar.

There are very basic functions that the legislative power is still missing.
Still, they want to regulate on super advanced topics up to the most specific
details.

~~~
carlmr
Also I think we can learn from software engineering. The higher in the
architecture you go, the more stable everything needs to be. Globals are bad
etc.

That's why you should minimize top-level regulation (e.g. EU, US level). And
make regulation as local as possible.

Localizing regulation allows for faster changes and better adapted regulations
to what people want. It also allows for A/B testing regulation, before rolling
it out to the masses.

Take health care as an example. The US has a lot of red and blue states. Most
people in red states don't want public health care, most people in blue states
want public health care.

On the other hand the more people you have in a health care system the better
the risk pooling. So you don't want it to be too local (e.g. district level).

So for effective regulation the federal level is wrong. The federal level
should neither make a public health system nor interfere with lower level
decisions to have one. But states might be a good level to start with.

That way you could have public health care in blue states quickly. The red
states would stay out of it. This would also allow for better A/B Testing.
Texas might see their neighbors in California faring better or worse now and
then either Texas or California may change their mind about it.

This would even make it possible that the public insurer in Vermont is maybe
more efficient than the one in California. Now if you allow people in
California to buy Vermont public insurance, you could even create competition
that keeps the public system more healthy.

It would make getting a majority easier. Because the more local you get, the
easier it is to make decisions.

And if you say this is too much load on local regulators. My proposal would be
that the federal level provides a default, and states can override that
default. Cities/Counties can override state defaults, etc.

This way you always get the most accurate. Most democratic decision.

This would also limit the effectiveness of lobbying, because the price of
bribing more and more local politicians would become ineffective in many more
cases.

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ABCLAW
I concur with the wisdom of software engineering. How could all of those
lawyers and governors of men have gotten it so wrong?

Nothing is more democratic and stable than a system where bad agents only need
to convince one podunk town which can locally supercede federal legislation to
legalize kickbacks and completely break everything.

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carlmr
You can still have an overarching framework for big, unchanging things.

The more local you go with your bribery, the more money you need to spend on
individuals and the less influence you buy.

Right now it's perfect for bribery, where you only need to bribe a select few
and you can destroy a whole country.

And those lawyers and governors haven't gotten it wrong, they get those bribes
they want and don't need to really answer to their voters. Perfect. For them.

~~~
ABCLAW
>Right now it's perfect for bribery, where you only need to bribe a select few
and you can destroy a whole country.

There are plenty of fraud reporting (not small scale stuff, we're talking
commissions, etc.) that describe how municipalities are functionally captured.
It is done today, but on a scale far smaller than what your plan allows. Also,
since the stakes are smaller, the oversight is smaller, which means there's
more, but less impactful fraud at that level. With your plan, we'd have more,
but now potentially even more impactful fraud.

You seem to believe you need to bribe ALL municipal-level politicians to get
what you want. That's not the case. One jurisdiction is enough for most ends.
As for price, you've just created competition for corruption among every
county. That drives prices down, not up.

Now that the attack surface is huge and the prices have plummeted, what do you
think happens next?

This is one counterargument, but there's a ton more. In short, every co-
ordination problem now has no venue to be solved unless it falls under your
umbrella of 'big, unchanging things', and sadly a lot of co-ordination
problems just plain aren't that simple.

As a bit of a double whammy, co-ordination problems underlie a large portion
(if not the overwhelming majority) of our issues in social systems. Removing
the government's ability to act on them is fatal to the government's ability
to govern.

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scottlocklin
Great, another PR piece by the mountebank clown car at "OpenAI" trying to tell
us the singularity is upon us, but please send us billions of investment
dollars so we can make it so and protect you from evil.

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mises
The worst part is that it's not just OpenAI, the politicians figured out this
is a good way to draw votes. The right does it to draw the rust belt, and the
left to draw the urban poor.

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apocalypstyx
Perhaps the real question is not whether we will survive the AI apocalypse,
but whether we will survive the existential tsunami that will probably pour
forth if we fail to build God and devoid of a God that could be dug out of the
past or created in the future, humanity is, in a way never before known,
condemned to be free and everything is rendered impossible.

~~~
dragonsky67
sorry, you lost me after the second comma.

Were you trying to say that we are going to be in trouble with the plebs if we
don't manage to create an all powerful AI for them to treat like God?

