Tom, bro, as much as I love you, I have a few very respectful points of dissent:
I don’t understand what I, as a British taxpayer, am getting out of this. I don’t understand why the UK in particular benefits from trying to take the regulatory lead on AI. In fact, it seems likely that we would be paying substantial costs and get no benefits, by actively making ourselves a worse place to do AI research as opposed to more permissive jurisdictions. We already have a very severe economic growth problem in the UK and should be careful about doing things to make it even worse.
I don’t understand what the world is supposed to be getting out of this, given the incredible dysfunctionality of virtually every major British public institution. Nothing works, as brutally exposed during the pandemic and since. The state cannot even provide very basic public goods like effective anti-pandemic institutions, A&E waiting times below 10 hours, and an Army capable of generating more than a single armoured brigade. I humbly suggest that it would be better for the state to learn to walk again before it tries something as complicated as regulation for cutting-edge AI. The Online Safety Bill is on the verge of banning WhatsApp, for crying out loud, which does not fill me with confidence about the state’s ability to regulate tech.
As you yourself rightly point out, AI regulation is likely to be especially difficult given the unprecedented nature of this technology, which makes it even harder to regulate and even more likely that a premature rush to regulation winds up doing incredible harm by cutting off access to a technology that could be a tremendous source of benefit. You cite the precedent of nuclear regulation. From where I stand this has been a disaster. Virtually no where in the West has access to cost-effective nuclear power generation at the moment, with South Korea seemingly the last remaining friendly country that can still build nuclear power plants and operate them at coal-competitive prices. Meanwhile North Korea and Pakistan have nuclear bombs (not sure which is worse). Something in nuclear regulation has gone horribly wrong and it makes me shiver when AI safety people cite it as some kind of useful precedent.
Tom, bro, as much as I love you, I have a few very respectful points of dissent:
I don’t understand what I, as a British taxpayer, am getting out of this. I don’t understand why the UK in particular benefits from trying to take the regulatory lead on AI. In fact, it seems likely that we would be paying substantial costs and get no benefits, by actively making ourselves a worse place to do AI research as opposed to more permissive jurisdictions. We already have a very severe economic growth problem in the UK and should be careful about doing things to make it even worse.
I don’t understand what the world is supposed to be getting out of this, given the incredible dysfunctionality of virtually every major British public institution. Nothing works, as brutally exposed during the pandemic and since. The state cannot even provide very basic public goods like effective anti-pandemic institutions, A&E waiting times below 10 hours, and an Army capable of generating more than a single armoured brigade. I humbly suggest that it would be better for the state to learn to walk again before it tries something as complicated as regulation for cutting-edge AI. The Online Safety Bill is on the verge of banning WhatsApp, for crying out loud, which does not fill me with confidence about the state’s ability to regulate tech.
As you yourself rightly point out, AI regulation is likely to be especially difficult given the unprecedented nature of this technology, which makes it even harder to regulate and even more likely that a premature rush to regulation winds up doing incredible harm by cutting off access to a technology that could be a tremendous source of benefit. You cite the precedent of nuclear regulation. From where I stand this has been a disaster. Virtually no where in the West has access to cost-effective nuclear power generation at the moment, with South Korea seemingly the last remaining friendly country that can still build nuclear power plants and operate them at coal-competitive prices. Meanwhile North Korea and Pakistan have nuclear bombs (not sure which is worse). Something in nuclear regulation has gone horribly wrong and it makes me shiver when AI safety people cite it as some kind of useful precedent.