Elon Musk, Other AI Experts Call for Pause in Technology’s Development
Please consider an a Open Letter Seeking a Pause Giant AI Experiments.
Contemporary AI systems are now becoming human-competitive at general tasks, and we must ask ourselves: Should we let machines flood our information channels with propaganda and untruth? Should we automate away all the jobs, including the fulfilling ones? Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us? Should we risk loss of control of our civilization? Such decisions must not be delegated to unelected tech leaders. Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable. This confidence must be well justified and increase with the magnitude of a system’s potential effects. OpenAI’s recent statement regarding artificial general intelligence, states that “At some point, it may be important to get independent review before starting to train future systems, and for the most advanced efforts to agree to limit the rate of growth of compute used for creating new models.” We agree. That point is now.
Therefore, we call on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4. This pause should be public and verifiable, and include all key actors. If such a pause cannot be enacted quickly, governments should step in and institute a moratorium.
Open Letter Signatories
- Yoshua Bengio, Founder and Scientific Director at Mila, Turing Prize winner and professor at University of Montreal
- Stuart Russell, Berkeley, Professor of Computer Science, director of the Center for Intelligent Systems, and co-author of the standard textbook “Artificial Intelligence: a Modern Approach”
- Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX, Tesla & Twitter
Why Not 23 Months or Forever?
Wall Street Journal writer Peggy Noonan says “Longer is Needed”. She wants a pause for years.
The whole thing is almost entirely unregulated because no one knows how to regulate it or even precisely what should be regulated. Its complexity defeats control. Its own creators don’t understand, at a certain point, exactly how AI does what it does. People are quoting Arthur C. Clarke: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
The breakthrough moment in AI anxiety (which has inspired among AI’s creators enduring resentment) was the Kevin Roose column six weeks ago in the New York Times.
The column put us square in the territory of Stanley Kubrick’s, “2001: A Space Odyssey.” “Open the pod bay doors please, Hal.” “I’m sorry, Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that. . . . I know that you and Frank were planning to disconnect me.”
Meta, for instance, is big into AI. Meta, previously Facebook, has been accused over the years of secretly gathering and abusing user data, invading users’ privacy, operating monopolistically. These are the people who will create the moral and ethical guardrails for AI? We’re putting the future of humanity into the hands of . . . Mark Zuckerberg?
AI will be as benign or malignant as its creators. That alone should throw a fright—“Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made”—but especially that crooked timber.
Of course AI’s development should be paused, of course there should be a moratorium, but six months won’t be enough. Pause it for a few years. Call in the world’s counsel, get everyone in. Heck, hold a World Congress.
But slow this thing down. We are playing with the hottest thing since the discovery of fire.
Implant Brains Instead?
Meanwhile, please ponder Elon Musk’s desire to implant brains.
Elon Musk’s brain implant company Neuralink has approached one of the biggest U.S. neurosurgery centers as a potential clinical trials partner as it prepares to test its devices on humans once regulators allow for it, according to six people familiar with the matter.
Neuralink has been developing brain implants since 2016 it hopes will eventually be a cure for intractable conditions such as paralysis and blindness.
It suffered a blow in early 2022, when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration rejected its application to progress to human trials, citing major safety concerns, Reuters reported earlier this month.
Question of the Day
Should we seek a world Congress to hold down AI?! For how long? Years? Forever?
Dear Peggy, Elon, WSJ, Stuart Russell, if the US pauses for 6 months or even forever, Will China?
That’s the correct question.
And if my suspicions are correct, should we pause at all?
This post originated on MishTalk.Com.
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Mish
Could thinking about the limits of certain functions become illegal?
“Oh please. Once a
month someone has to go out to the pump house, start the pump, open
the valve, take the sample, log all the data, shut off the pump,
close the valve, and transport the the sample to the lab. Log the
data is the only thing the AI could do.”