Rules before Governance (AI edition)
Stop debating AI regulation and government in the abstract.
Areo Magazine has published my article "In Defence of Tinkerers: Why We Need Open AI”. It lays out the balance of risks and opportunities of artificial intelligence. Go read the whole thing, but the public-policy crux is:
This still requires sensible legal limits on AI development. But, like all the best laws, those limits should be part of a framework that secures the rights of the general public: in this case, the right to create and commercialise AI, as long as this is done responsibility. Both the freedom and the responsibility should apply universally: to individual tinkerers, governments, well-connected corporations and academics
The timing was lucky because it dropped just as chatter around AI has moved to regulation. The ever-excellent Timothy B. Lee has an excellent review of the various proposals. But the Spectacle is more about extraterritorial red tape from the EU,and the boss of Open AI asking Congress for monoporegulation. OpenAI then followed this up with a blog post.
My own post talks about a framework of laws that should both protect and limit the rights of the public to work with AI. But I am a time-traveller from a past century to be writing about laws, rights, or even the public.
The modern talk is about “regulation” and “governance”. It’s not about how people ought behave towards one another, rather it’s about how to build power structures that will then tell people how to behave. OpenAI knows that it
some degree of coordination among the leading development efforts
and that
we are likely to eventually need something like an IAEA
and that
the governance of the most powerful systems, as well as decisions regarding their deployment, must have strong public oversight
But they don’t give any hint as to what actual sorts of rules and limits they actually want. They don’t know. But they somehow do think they know that these governance structures will choose to do the right thing.
Fuck that. Let’s talk about the actual rules before appointing overlords.
Read my article to see what rules I'd recommend. You will no doubt have different ideas. That’s fine. But I urge you all to stop debating regulation and government in the abstract, and instead think seriously about actual rules and norms of behaviour you’d like to see. Let that guide your own behaviour and the guide the voice you add to the shaping of your country’s laws.