There has been an increase in concern over AI destroying humanity, most recently spurred by tweets from former Anthropic employee Jacob Coxon about how dangerous AI is, and a follow-up tweet from current employee Evan Hubinger, who said “Jacob is correct here — we really do earnestly believe A.I. could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade.” Some in the AI world are calling for “the U.S. government support an international effort to develop the technical and governance tools needed to deliberately pace the frontier of automated AI development” and there has been much discussion of trying to slow down or stop all AI research. Now, a new open letter is circulating, this time from academics worried about the possibility of a “global catastrophe” resulting from AI, calling for political leaders to “create an international treaty, much like the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.” It was written by philosopher Molly Gardner (University of Florida) and made public yesterday. If you’re interested in reading or signing it, it’s here: “Open Letter from Academics Concerning Recent Developments in Artificial Intelligence“. What follows are some thoughts of mine about one approach to mitigating AI risk. I don’t intend to discourage people from signing the “Open Letter from Academics Concerning Recent Developments in Artificial Intelligence“—it couldn’t hurt to do so. But for various reasons, I think efforts to slow or or stop AI research face an insurmountable collective action problem. Even if the well-known corporations working on AI cease their efforts (itself highly unlikely), research and development will continue. AI tools are relevantly not like nuclear weapons, insofar as work to create and improve them is much less detectable, so enforcement will be extremely difficult or invasive. And since the claims about AI destroying humanity are speculative, the scenarios they describe are unprecedented, and AI is not seen unambiguously as a weapon, there will be insufficient will to implement a regime of punishment (on individuals, corporations, nations) severe enough to effectively enforce cooperation. I don’t know more about AI than people like Coxon and Hubinger, and while I’m not fully convinced of their pessimism, I haven’t read anything (yet) by other knowledgeable people to show..
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