You don’t try to prevent nuclear disaster by making friendly nuclear missiles, you try to keep them out of the hands of nefarious or careless agents or provide disincentives for building them in the first place.
The difficulty of the policy problem depends on the quality of our technical solutions: how large an advantage can you get by behaving unsafely? If the answer is “you get big advantages for sacrificing safety, and a small group behaving unsafely could cause a big problem” then we have put ourselves in a sticky situation and will need to conjure up some unusually effective international coordination.
A perfect technical solution would make the policy problem relatively easy—if we had a scalable+competitive+secure solution to AI control, then there would be minimal risk from reckless actors. On the flip side, a perfect policy solution would make the technical problem relatively easy since we could just collectively decide not to build any kind of AI that could cause trouble. In reality we are probably going to need both.
You could hold the position that the advantages from building uncontrolled AI will predictably be very low even without any further work. I disagree strongly with that and think that it contradicts the balance of public argument, though I don’t know if I’d call it “easily corrected.”
The difficulty of the policy problem depends on the quality of our technical solutions: how large an advantage can you get by behaving unsafely? If the answer is “you get big advantages for sacrificing safety, and a small group behaving unsafely could cause a big problem” then we have put ourselves in a sticky situation and will need to conjure up some unusually effective international coordination.
A perfect technical solution would make the policy problem relatively easy—if we had a scalable+competitive+secure solution to AI control, then there would be minimal risk from reckless actors. On the flip side, a perfect policy solution would make the technical problem relatively easy since we could just collectively decide not to build any kind of AI that could cause trouble. In reality we are probably going to need both.
(I wrote about this here.)
You could hold the position that the advantages from building uncontrolled AI will predictably be very low even without any further work. I disagree strongly with that and think that it contradicts the balance of public argument, though I don’t know if I’d call it “easily corrected.”