I'm sure some people will have issue with my phrasing but, honest question:
Are there examples of where we have collective decided not to pursue knowledge? Successfully?
I guess nuclear weapons might be the best example though research doesn't seem have to actually "stopped" as much as gone underground and we still have country trying to climb that ladder.
But I don't know how relevant that is to LLMs/AI. It almost feels like pandora's box is open and our only option is continue to improve them. There is clearly value in what they do and while I can absolutely see the dangers, for example: authoritative governments and surveillance, I'm not convinced to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
All of technology back to the printing press (and probably before that) could also be said to make it easier for governments to oppress their citizens. Making laws (and enforcing them!) to prevent governments from doing these things feels like that route forward, not trying to stick our heads in the sand.
Perhaps I'm horribly naive, perhaps I just see the SciFi future I've spent my life reading and dreaming about on the horizon and I'm blinded by the reality, perhaps my ideals around "knowledge deserves to be free/accessible" are misguided. I don't know.
If you read the scenario, you'll see that the regulations are mostly about what people can do with giant compute clusters, and not about the ideas themselves. The ideas themselves are required to be totally transparent to the public.
As for historic precedents: Human cloning, human genome editing, and mirror life seem like one precedent; nuclear weapons and nuclear energy another; come to think of it I think drone delivery was strangled by regulations too...? Plan A isn't a proposal to never build superintelligence, it's a proposal to build it more cautiously and transparently.
While technology has empowered governments, it’s also empowered the individual, and more importantly shifted the material dynamics to better align the incentives of governments with the people. Democracy followed material change, it didn’t precede it. Democracy came about because it was optimal for a power seeking government, not out of the kindness of their heart.
A resource extraction based economy sees people as slaves. The true source of power is the resource, people are just a means to an end, so you mistreat the people as much as you can get away with in pursuit of the resource while avoiding revolt.
With stable infrastructure, the government makes far more from an educated, rich population that it can tax and use the innovation from. It’s against its own quest for power to interfere too much in the prosperity of its citizens. The incentives are aligned.
Solving the AI problem isn’t about stopping the tech or making a bunch of brittle laws. It’s always been about alignment: aligning the large AGI-like entities that are the modern state, the modern economy, representative democracy, or AGI itself, with human prosperity
No, of course not. That would be an insane trust fall. Even relatively small advances in technology give a country world dominating power. Fun fact: India was militarily superior to Britain in the 1600s—a gunpowder empire with a million soldiers—but was taken over by it in the 1700s. Britain’s edge was small: lighter, more maneuverable cannons, standardized ammunition, better military and political organization. Not a first world country versus a third world country—more like the dynamic US versus a sclerotic EU. And that modest edge led to 200 years of colonization.
If we slow down on ASI voluntarily we’d be allowing a gap to open up that would make the difference between colonial europe and colonized Asia/Africa look trivial. It would be insane.
You overstate the advantages of technology. Mughal India was fragmented and on a sharp decline. The British used politics, finance, and treachery to divide and conquer what was remaining.
That’s a possibility, but not the only one. The two most realistic ones are: we race ahead and maintain our status, or we slow down and open ourselves up to colonization.
I think the question “would China cooperate” needs much more investigation. Everyone online pundit seems to think “obviously not”, but they’re people too with clear positive and negative incentives. It’s possible they’ve found a very similar calculus that we have.
The decision to not go with the development of extremely large thermonuclear weapons might count - the US Sundial Project was supposed to be about 10 gigatons of TNT. Not the most practical weapons but once you get to a certain size delivery arguably stops being a problem - its going to kill everyone anyway so doesn't matter where you let it off!
Taking the approach with AI that we took with the atomic bomb would be catastrophic. If the only people who are allowed to use this technology are governments, intelligence agencies, and a select few anointed companies, then the risk of authoritarian misuse will skyrocket.
I worry that any attempt to limit their use and development will be abused and misdirected. We are already seeing people like Anthropic doing this, they are trying to use anti-AI sentiment to engage in regulatory capture. Go watch Dario’s speeches about how open weight models are dangerous and how they are “not really open”. Everyone can see that much of this “safety” conversation is ultimately just a tactic to shut potential competitors out of the market and establish a monopoly/duopoly.
I agree. I guess I should have said something like:
"Stopping" LLM research just means it will be in the hands of a few who can abuse it. I'd rather a state of M.A.D. but instead of a handful of countries/governments it's millions/billions of people with access to the models (open ideally). Again, perhaps horribly naive or misguided, I understand that bioterrorism could (is?) a real problem as well as more "mundane" things like building a bomb (nuclear or otherwise).
I just feel like limiting access to governments or "blessed" entities is even worse.
Yes, there are examples of where we have collective decided not to pursue a particular technology tree.
For one, Japan banned guns for a few centuries. (Its warrior class was politically powerful and judged that guns would disrupt class relations too much.)
And there have been successful world-wide bans.
For example, following the invention of recombinant DNA technology, scientists convened the Asilomar Conference in 1975. They established a voluntary self-moratorium on certain types of genetic engineering until strict laboratory containment protocols were created.
In the 1980s, bioethicists, theologians, and researchers established a hard ethical line between somatic editing (treating an existing patient's non-reproductive cells) and germline editing (altering future generations).
No one has performed the latter form of genetic engineering except for Chinese scientist He Jiankui in 2018. (Chinese society used to be more ambivalent about the technology than the West is.) In response, Beijing heavily tightened its laws, classifying heritable gene editing as a high-risk medical technology subject to the penal code, and He Jiankui was sentenced to three years in prison.
I completely can see why we'd want to, for ethical reasons, ban germline editing, and I want to be clear that I agree doing so cannot be done ethically, but there is a part of me that is wistful for what could have been. Same with things like CRISPR but it's probably just fun to dream and the reality would be a nightmare.
I found the AI 2027 paper to be overly optimistic, but not wholly fantastical. This paper feels wildly speculative, and relies on premises I am not confident even pass surface reasoning. Even under optimistic conditions, we are not going to see robots "capable of 95% of all cognitive and physical tasks" by 2035. Nor do I think a 74% unemployment rate is even remotely possible. Economic collapse would implode AI development long before those figures were plausible.
It seems to me
we’re already at the top of the S curve, not at the toe of an exponential curve. At least with LLMs. Better training data will make small improvements, better architecture will make it less compute intensive, and all these “hyper-scale” data centers will make it cheap and ubiquitous. But none of that is it getting exponentially more intelligent.
This is by far the most realistic optimistic AI takeoff scenario I've seen, and more specifically it's the first one I've read that deals with both the AI alignment and power concentration issues in a sufficient way, even in a world where hard alignment is assumed (in this scenario the AIs are assumed to be misaligned until ~2038-39).
Bravo, and I hope it has the impact on the AI safety field it deserves to have.
If carbon taxes are already a lethal policy for an political campaign, it's absurd to think that fears of ASI will create any real movement around pausing AI.
If there is any movement to pause AI development, it will come from the general public's dislike of these companies. Not from the AI safety angle.
If that is true and one cares about a moratorium on progress in the US then it seems like the number one way is to meet people where they are: so water use misinformation, degrowth, power supply constraints. That does place all the people who push for these things in a different light. They may well be attempting to do what the AI safety labs are ostensibly trying to do.
As an AI safetyist, one’s closest ally (in a distributed coordinated way) is the populist misinformer. Fascinating.
If there's going to be any pause, I'm sure it will come from a populist movement. I just can't imagine misplaced worries about AI water use will translate into the kinds of policy the authors want to see.
Yeah it’s like shoving the top of a double pendulum. You will get some movement in one direction, but where it will precisely land is hard to predict. The water-use argument is already earning refinement by differentiating “AI datacenters” from “normal datacenters” in an effort to control the movement.
I imagine any populism movement will require rampant fearmongering to get a result. Considering the rough present alignments, presumably blue tribe focused propaganda will involve climate and inequality focused fear and red tribe focused propaganda will involve job loss. Grey tribe positioning is the P(doom) meme where everyone is rewarded for a high-P(doom) estimate.
Did anyone else catch the logical inconsistency between Plan C and A?
Plan C:
> "... fewer and fewer humans are needed to conduct AI R&D, meaning that covert projects are easier and easier to pull off without detection."
Plan A:
> "... training AIs requires large numbers of AI chips. Most AI chips are in giant datacenters.50 AI datacenters are typically big enough to be visible from space, and power-hungry enough to require conspicuous infrastructure. New AI chips can only be manufactured at a handful of fabrication plants (fabs), located mostly in Taiwan, South Korea, the US, and China. The US and China negotiate with the countries that have a major role in the chip supply chain, and they require each major datacenter owner (and their upstream suppliers, including chip fabs) to publicly declare their major purchases and sales."
Plan A requires properties of AI training that Plan C requires do not exist.
By legislative design? If a nuclear bomb could be made with hardware store finds the world would already be over. Big collaborative works raise the stakes and the observability for surveillance. Apply for a job at a defense supplier or even and energy company.
If AI production is limited to big labs and big data centers then it is de facto contained and monitored. If you know where all the ASML machines are then you know the reproduction rates of chips. If no one can buy or build the machines required to concentrate uranium or plutonium to critical levels then the threat is contained and monitored.
You can dig up all the Uraninite you want. It was never much of a secret that uranium had dark applications. The machines and processes where thankfully big and expensive enough that only the most focused bad actors could aquire them and then hold the world hostage to the degree they do. If al-qaeda or isis could have used $40 bombs from home depot instead of expensive planes they would have (and they do).
You have to legislate and control the big, expensive, and slow things. Dynamite and phentanyl are so dangerous because they move much more easily. Freedom does not have to be a suicide pact. If the inconvenience of requiring prescriptions or access to dynamite reduces harm then it is net positive?
In Plan C the government essentially misses the opportunity to implement the multinational deal while the threat of covert projects is still low (fewer latest-gen chips unaccounted by tracking measures, worse models/algorithms to use for RSI). That's why it says the probability of a deal is lower and lower each month rather than outright zero.
Whenever I encounter these people I'm reminded of the meme about the baby who has doubled his weight in the three months since birth. At that growth rate, he'll weigh trillions of pounds by age 10.
Nothing follows from this empty platitude though, right? It can't inform you choices or decisions? It's just a disempowering thought?
They are buying up all the RAM today. Do you think "this is fine because in 5 years post-crash I can buy some cheap RAM"? If everyone with money is betting differently, do you have some information they don't, or is the whole economy just slipping away from you?
You experience luxuries today, that no king 1000 years ago could afford. Instant access to communication, food, medicine for the right price of course.
The consumer economy was great while it lasted but it's over now. We have machines that do useful mechanical work (engines) and useful intellectual work (llm-computers). Capital will move productive work from people to machines(if we let them), and the only jobs left will be delivery driver and warehouse, and then those will be gone too.
Human population was exponential and now its flat, but that's a function of what exacly? It could go back down to 1 billion or less. When jobs demanded a person supply was ready to match it. When jobs dont demand a person? Go to a degrowth rally take the temperature (and average age and child-per-person ratio) to get a taste of the future shape of supply and demand in a pessimistic world of sentences that don't have subjects just vague plattitudes. Are they net shutting down grade schools or building them in your neck of the woods?
AI is just a tool. It will be a tool as we constantly push the requirements of what qualifies as consciousness. Therefore I'm not worried about it. Almost all the predictions about future growth of technology were incorrect. We don't have flying cars, hoverboards, fusion, the matrix and so on. The goal of each of us is to live a better life. It always be and forcing people to give up luxuries for some external agenda based on slippery slopes is cruel and selfish.
We should have been under water, hunted by AI, overpopulated, killed by terrorist, smitten by god for our sins and so on. Luckily all it took was our privacy and a lot of tax money to survive.
Degrowth is a deeply unpopular policy around the world. Where would one even go to find a degrowth rally? I have to imagine everyone there would be there ironically.
> * they net shutting down grade schools or building them in your neck of the woods?*
My area (rural Iowa) has had several new schools built in the last 10 years. Net gain for sure.
People overestimate progress in physical world.
2035:
robot population will soon be larger than the human one
I'd bet that in most places 9 years is about the time needed to build a residential building. I think a good way to think about this is to think of this as producing a serial car. From pitching and capital acquisition to building a prototype to software, regulatory and then the final product which needs multiple factories and supply chains. Yes, of course robots sound cooler and there are compounding effects yada yada, but on the other side there are as many obstacles as things that accelerate this product (like capital acquisition and fearmongering of gov to bend regulatory stuff faster).
Hey, author here! Scott did contribute, but less than before.
On his blog he says: "I did a lot of writing for AI 2027 and was listed as a co-author. Some of my writing made it into Plan A too, but it was a bit less. The difference is of degree rather than kind, but because of this - and to give me more latitude to discuss it the way I like with less PR blowback - we decided not to put me as a co-author this time. I continue to be proud of having a part in this, small as it may be. (related: everything in this post is my opinion only, and not officially endorsed by the AI Futures Project)"
... and in the meantime people are looking at their AI bills and realizing tokens aren't worth what they cost. The frontier is getting the cost down, not getting intelligence up. In a cage match between this guy and "Ed", Ed wins.
This is dangerously naive and misguided. They claim to want to avoid centralization of control but propose a world police state of AI regulation. Governments exerting this much control will only end in war and tyranny.
If the production, and distribution of the tech is confined to one or two companies, then those two companies and the resulting power that comes to them, makes them the de facto world government. (Democratic choice may be a farce but it is a useful friction on net.)
If they own all the RAM, models, and the means to do any work, then you are at their mercy. They will buy all the RAM, leaving you none, then all the transport, then all the electricity. You will be as boxed out of the current economy as the Amish and it will get its plug pulled.
Gradual Disempowerment is the default plan right now. War and tyrrany are not remotely the worst case scenario. I'll take Butlerian Jihad over being turned into cattle any day.
Imagine solving for equilibrium with two classes of beings. One requires agricultural land and 20 years to become individually productive and barely maintains a healthy population in a entertainment saturated landscape. The second eats only electricity and is ready to work on day 1. Round 1 goes to the strongest gorilla for sure, round 100?
If LLMs had come to earth in spaceships would you have welcomed them into your work and your home?
What predictions about the technology are the authors making that you do not believe?
There is plenty falsifiable in this in ai-2027.com, and they have not gotten everything right. But some things they have: for example, the Pentagon has already invoked export controls to restrict the deployment of a frontier model. This level of government oversight wasn't predicted until 2027 in the original scenario.
LLM adoption is 30% in the charts I saw googling for "ai adoption". An example of capibility: I have had Claude one shot an RL agent that learns connect four in 30 minutes. That's PhD level stuff.
LLMS are 4 years old and the companies that sell them 10x every year. What evidence can you cite? Could you convince a disinterested 3rd party you have anything other than cope? What facts about the world make you think this is anything other than the new (and probably temporary) normal?
Are there examples of where we have collective decided not to pursue knowledge? Successfully?
I guess nuclear weapons might be the best example though research doesn't seem have to actually "stopped" as much as gone underground and we still have country trying to climb that ladder.
But I don't know how relevant that is to LLMs/AI. It almost feels like pandora's box is open and our only option is continue to improve them. There is clearly value in what they do and while I can absolutely see the dangers, for example: authoritative governments and surveillance, I'm not convinced to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
All of technology back to the printing press (and probably before that) could also be said to make it easier for governments to oppress their citizens. Making laws (and enforcing them!) to prevent governments from doing these things feels like that route forward, not trying to stick our heads in the sand.
Perhaps I'm horribly naive, perhaps I just see the SciFi future I've spent my life reading and dreaming about on the horizon and I'm blinded by the reality, perhaps my ideals around "knowledge deserves to be free/accessible" are misguided. I don't know.
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