The era of Artificial Intelligence is here, and boy are people freaking out.
Fortunately, I am here to bring the good news: AI will not destroy the world, and in fact may save it.
First, a short description of what AI is:
The application of mathematics and software code to teach computers how
to understand, synthesize, and generate knowledge in ways similar to
how people do it. AI is a computer program like any other – it runs,
takes input, processes, and generates output. AI’s output is useful
across a wide range of fields, ranging from coding to medicine to law to
the creative arts. It is owned by people and controlled by people, like
any other technology.
A shorter description of what AI isn’t:
Killer software and robots that will spring to life and decide to
murder the human race or otherwise ruin everything, like you see in the movies.
An even shorter description of what AI could be: A way to make everything we care about better.
Why AI Can Make Everything We Care About Better
The most validated core conclusion of social science across many decades and thousands of studies is that human
intelligence makes a very broad range of life outcomes better. Smarter
people have better outcomes in almost every domain of activity: academic
achievement, job performance, occupational status, income, creativity,
physical health, longevity, learning new skills, managing complex tasks,
leadership, entrepreneurial success, conflict resolution, reading
comprehension, financial decision making, understanding others’
perspectives, creative arts, parenting outcomes, and life satisfaction.
Further,
human intelligence is the lever that we have used for millennia to
create the world we live in today: science, technology, math, physics,
chemistry, medicine, energy, construction, transportation,
communication, art, music, culture, philosophy, ethics, morality.
Without the application of intelligence on all these domains, we would
all still be living in mud huts, scratching out a meager existence of
subsistence farming. Instead we have used our intelligence to raise our
standard of living on the order of 10,000X over the last 4,000 years.
What AI offers us is the opportunity to profoundly augment human
intelligence to make all of these outcomes of intelligence – and many
others, from the creation of new medicines to ways to solve climate
change to technologies to reach the stars – much, much better from here.
AI
augmentation of human intelligence has already started – AI is already
around us in the form of computer control systems of many kinds, is now
rapidly escalating with AI Large Language Models like ChatGPT, and will
accelerate very quickly from here – if we let it.
In our new era of AI:
Every
child will have an AI tutor that is infinitely patient, infinitely
compassionate, infinitely knowledgeable, infinitely helpful. The AI
tutor will be by each child’s side every step of their development,
helping them maximize their potential with the machine version of
infinite love.
Every person will have an AI
assistant/coach/mentor/trainer/advisor/therapist that is infinitely
patient, infinitely compassionate, infinitely knowledgeable, and
infinitely helpful. The AI assistant will be present through all of
life’s opportunities and challenges, maximizing every person’s outcomes.
Every
scientist will have an AI assistant/collaborator/partner that will
greatly expand their scope of scientific research and achievement. Every
artist, every engineer, every businessperson, every doctor, every
caregiver will have the same in their worlds.
Every
leader of people – CEO, government official, nonprofit president,
athletic coach, teacher – will have the same. The magnification effects
of better decisions by leaders across the people they lead are enormous,
so this intelligence augmentation may be the most important of all.
Productivity
growth throughout the economy will accelerate dramatically, driving
economic growth, creation of new industries, creation of new jobs, and
wage growth, and resulting in a new era of heightened material
prosperity across the planet.
The creative arts will
enter a golden age, as AI-augmented artists, musicians, writers, and
filmmakers gain the ability to realize their visions far faster and at
greater scale than ever before.
I even think AI
is going to improve warfare, when it has to happen, by reducing wartime
death rates dramatically. Every war is characterized by terrible
decisions made under intense pressure and with sharply limited
information by very limited human leaders. Now, military commanders and
political leaders will have AI advisors that will help them make much
better strategic and tactical decisions, minimizing risk, error, and
unnecessary bloodshed.
In short, anything that
people do with their natural intelligence today can be done much better
with AI, and we will be able to take on new challenges that have been
impossible to tackle without AI, from curing all diseases to achieving
interstellar travel.
And this isn’t just about intelligence! Perhaps the most underestimated quality of AI is how humanizing it can be. AI art gives people who otherwise lack technical skills the freedom to create and share their artistic ideas. Talking to an empathetic AI friend really does improve their ability to handle adversity. And AI medical chatbots are already more empathetic
than their human counterparts. Rather than making the world harsher and
more mechanistic, infinitely patient and sympathetic AI will make the
world warmer and nicer.
The stakes here are high.
The opportunities are profound. AI is quite possibly the most important
– and best – thing our civilization has ever created, certainly on par
with electricity and microchips, and probably beyond those.
The
development and proliferation of AI – far from a risk that we should
fear – is a moral obligation that we have to ourselves, to our children,
and to our future.
We should be living in a much better world with AI, and now we can.
So Why The Panic?
In contrast to this positive view, the public conversation about AI is presently shot through with hysterical fear and paranoia.
We
hear claims that AI will variously kill us all, ruin our society, take
all our jobs, cause crippling inequality, and enable bad people to do
awful things.
What explains this divergence in potential outcomes from near utopia to horrifying dystopia?
Historically, every new technology that matters, from electric lighting to automobiles to radio to the Internet, has sparked a moral panic – a social contagion that convinces people the new technology is going to destroy the world, or society, or both. The fine folks at Pessimists Archive
have documented these technology-driven moral panics over the decades;
their history makes the pattern vividly clear. It turns out this present
panic is not even the first for AI.
Now,
it is certainly the case that many new technologies have led to bad
outcomes – often the same technologies that have been otherwise
enormously beneficial to our welfare. So it’s not that the mere
existence of a moral panic means there is nothing to be concerned about.
But a moral panic is by its very nature irrational
– it takes what may be a legitimate concern and inflates it into a
level of hysteria that ironically makes it harder to confront actually
serious concerns.
And wow do we have a full-blown moral panic about AI right now.
This
moral panic is already being used as a motivating force by a variety of
actors to demand policy action – new AI restrictions, regulations, and
laws. These actors, who are making extremely dramatic public statements
about the dangers of AI – feeding on and further inflaming moral panic –
all present themselves as selfless champions of the public good.
But are they?
And are they right or wrong?
The Baptists And Bootleggers Of AI
Economists have observed a longstanding pattern
in reform movements of this kind. The actors within movements like
these fall into two categories – “Baptists” and “Bootleggers” – drawing
on the historical example of the prohibition of alcohol in the United States in the 1920’s:
“Baptists”
are the true believer social reformers who legitimately feel – deeply
and emotionally, if not rationally – that new restrictions, regulations,
and laws are required to prevent societal disaster.
For alcohol prohibition, these actors were often literally devout Christians who felt that alcohol was destroying the moral fabric of society.
For
AI risk, these actors are true believers that AI presents one or
another existential risks – strap them to a polygraph, they really mean
it.
“Bootleggers” are the
self-interested opportunists who stand to financially profit by the
imposition of new restrictions, regulations, and laws that insulate them
from competitors.
For alcohol prohibition, these were the literal bootleggers who made a fortune selling illicit alcohol to Americans when legitimate alcohol sales were banned.
For
AI risk, these are CEOs who stand to make more money if regulatory
barriers are erected that form a cartel of government-blessed AI vendors
protected from new startup and open source competition – the software
version of “too big to fail” banks.
A cynic
would suggest that some of the apparent Baptists are also Bootleggers –
specifically the ones paid to attack AI by their universities, think tanks, activist groups, and media outlets. If you are paid a salary or receive grants to foster AI panic…you are probably a Bootlegger.
The problem with the Bootleggers is that they win.
The Baptists are naive ideologues, the Bootleggers are cynical
operators, and so the result of reform movements like these is often
that the Bootleggers get what they want – regulatory capture, insulation
from competition, the formation of a cartel – and the Baptists are left
wondering where their drive for social improvement went so wrong.
We
just lived through a stunning example of this – banking reform after
the 2008 global financial crisis. The Baptists told us that we needed
new laws and regulations to break up the “too big to fail” banks to
prevent such a crisis from ever happening again. So Congress passed the
Dodd-Frank Act of 2010, which was marketed as satisfying the Baptists’
goal, but in reality was coopted by the Bootleggers – the big banks. The
result is that the same banks that were “too big to fail” in 2008 are much, much larger now.
So in practice, even when the Baptists are genuine – and even when the Baptists are right – they are used as cover by manipulative and venal Bootleggers to benefit themselves.
And this is what is happening in the drive for AI regulation right now.
However,
it isn’t sufficient to simply identify the actors and impugn their
motives. We should consider the arguments of both the Baptists and the
Bootleggers on their merits.
AI Risk #1: Will AI Kill Us All?
The first and original AI doomer risk is that AI will decide to literally kill humanity.
The
fear that technology of our own creation will rise up and destroy us is
deeply coded into our culture. The Greeks expressed this fear in the
Prometheus Myth – Prometheus brought the destructive power of fire, and
more generally technology (“techne”), to man, for which Prometheus was
condemned to perpetual torture by the gods. Later, Mary Shelley gave us
moderns our own version of this myth in her novel Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus,
in which we develop the technology for eternal life, which then rises
up and seeks to destroy us. And of course, no AI panic newspaper story
is complete without a still image of a gleaming red-eyed killer robot
from James Cameron’s Terminator films.
The
presumed evolutionary purpose of this mythology is to motivate us to
seriously consider potential risks of new technologies – fire, after
all, can indeed be used to burn down entire cities. But just as fire was
also the foundation of modern civilization as used to keep us warm and
safe in a cold and hostile world, this mythology ignores the far greater
upside of most – all? – new technologies, and in practice inflames
destructive emotion rather than reasoned analysis. Just because
premodern man freaked out like this doesn’t mean we have to; we can
apply rationality instead.
My view is that the idea that AI will decide to literally kill humanity is a profound category error.
AI is not a living being that has been primed by billions of years of
evolution to participate in the battle for the survival of the fittest,
as animals are, and as we are. It is math – code – computers, built by
people, owned by people, used by people, controlled by people. The idea
that it will at some point develop a mind of its own and decide that it
has motivations that lead it to try to kill us is a superstitious
handwave.
In short, AI doesn’t want, it doesn’t have goals, it doesn’t want to kill you, because it’s not alive. And AI is a machine – is not going to come alive any more than your toaster will.
Now,
obviously, there are true believers in killer AI – Baptists – who are
gaining a suddenly stratospheric amount of media coverage for their
terrifying warnings, some of whom claim to have been studying the topic
for decades and say they are now scared out of their minds by what they
have learned. Some of these true believers are even actual innovators of the technology. These actors are arguing for a variety of bizarre and extreme restrictions on AI ranging from a ban on AI development, all the way up to military airstrikes on datacenters and nuclear war. They argue that because people like me cannot rule out future catastrophic consequences of AI, that we must assume a precautionary stance that may require large amounts of physical violence and death in order to prevent potential existential risk.
My response is that their position is non-scientific – What is the testable hypothesis? What would falsify the hypothesis? How do we know when we are getting into a danger zone? These questions go mainly unanswered apart from “You can’t prove it won’t happen!” In fact, these Baptists’ position is so non-scientific and so
extreme – a conspiracy theory about math and code – and is already
calling for physical violence, that I will do something I would normally
not do and question their motives as well.
Specifically, I think three things are going on:
First,
recall that John Von Neumann responded to Robert Oppenheimer’s famous
hand-wringing about his role creating nuclear weapons – which helped end
World War II and prevent World War III – with, “Some people confess
guilt to claim credit for the sin.” What is the most dramatic way one
can claim credit for the importance of one’s work without sounding
overtly boastful? This explains the mismatch between the words and
actions of the Baptists who are actually building and funding AI – watch
their actions, not their words. (Truman was harsher after meeting with
Oppenheimer: “Don’t let that crybaby in here again.”)
Second,
some of the Baptists are actually Bootleggers. There is a whole
profession of “AI safety expert”, “AI ethicist”, “AI risk researcher”.
They are paid to be doomers, and their statements should be processed
appropriately.
Third, California is justifiably famous for our many thousands of cults,
from EST to the Peoples Temple, from Heaven’s Gate to the Manson
Family. Many, although not all, of these cults are harmless, and maybe
even serve a purpose for alienated people who find homes in them. But
some are very dangerous indeed, and cults have a notoriously hard time
straddling the line that ultimately leads to violence and death.
And the reality, which is obvious to everyone in the Bay Area but probably not outside of it, is that “AI risk” has developed into a cult,
which has suddenly emerged into the daylight of global press attention
and the public conversation. This cult has pulled in not just fringe
characters, but also some actual industry experts and a not small number
of wealthy donors – including, until recently, Sam Bankman-Fried. And it’s developed a full panoply of cult behaviors and beliefs.
This cult is why there are a set of AI risk doomers who sound so extreme
– it’s not that they actually have secret knowledge that make their
extremism logical, it’s that they’ve whipped themselves into a frenzy
and really are…extremely extreme.
It turns out that this type of cult isn’t new – there is a longstanding Western tradition of millenarianism,
which generates apocalypse cults. The AI risk cult has all the
hallmarks of a millenarian apocalypse cult. From Wikipedia, with
additions by me:
“Millenarianism is the belief by a group
or movement [AI risk doomers] in a coming fundamental transformation of
society [the arrival of AI], after which all things will be changed [AI
utopia, dystopia, and/or end of the world]. Only dramatic events [AI
bans, airstrikes on datacenters, nuclear strikes on unregulated AI] are
seen as able to change the world [prevent AI] and the change is
anticipated to be brought about, or survived, by a group of the devout
and dedicated. In most millenarian scenarios, the disaster or battle to
come [AI apocalypse, or its prevention] will be followed by a new,
purified world [AI bans] in which the believers will be rewarded [or at
least acknowledged to have been correct all along].”
This apocalypse cult pattern is so obvious that I am surprised more people don’t see it.
Don’t get me wrong, cults are fun to hear about, their written material is often creative and fascinating, and their members are engaging at dinner parties and on TV. But their extreme beliefs should not determine the future of laws and society – obviously not.
AI Risk #2: Will AI Ruin Our Society?
The
second widely mooted AI risk is that AI will ruin our society, by
generating outputs that will be so “harmful”, to use the nomenclature of
this kind of doomer, as to cause profound damage to humanity, even if
we’re not literally killed.
Short version: If the murder robots don’t get us, the hate speech and misinformation will.
This
is a relatively recent doomer concern that branched off from and
somewhat took over the “AI risk” movement that I described above. In
fact, the terminology of AI risk recently changed from “AI safety” – the
term used by people who are worried that AI would literally kill us –
to “AI alignment” – the term used by people who are worried about
societal “harms”. The original AI safety people are frustrated by this
shift, although they don’t know how to put it back in the box – they now
advocate that the actual AI risk topic be renamed “AI notkilleveryoneism”, which has not yet been widely adopted but is at least clear.
The tipoff to the nature of the AI societal risk claim is its own term, “AI alignment”. Alignment with what? Human values. Whose human values? Ah, that’s where things get tricky.
As it happens, I have had a front row seat to an analogous situation – the social media “trust and safety” wars. As is now obvious,
social media services have been under massive pressure from governments
and activists to ban, restrict, censor, and otherwise suppress a wide
range of content for many years. And the same concerns of “hate speech”
(and its mathematical counterpart, “algorithmic bias”) and
“misinformation” are being directly transferred from the social media context to the new frontier of “AI alignment”.
My big learnings from the social media wars are:
On the one hand, there is no absolutist free speech position. First, every country, including the United States, makes at least some content illegal.
Second, there are certain kinds of content, like child pornography and
incitements to real world violence, that are nearly universally agreed
to be off limits – legal or not – by virtually every society. So any
technological platform that facilitates or generates content – speech –
is going to have some restrictions.
On
the other hand, the slippery slope is not a fallacy, it’s an
inevitability. Once a framework for restricting even egregiously
terrible content is in place – for example, for hate speech, a specific
hurtful word, or for misinformation, obviously false claims like “the Pope is dead” – a shockingly broad range of government agencies and activist pressure groups and nongovernmental entities
will kick into gear and demand ever greater levels of censorship and
suppression of whatever speech they view as threatening to society
and/or their own personal preferences. They will do this up to and
including in ways that are nakedly felony crimes.
This cycle in practice can run apparently forever, with the
enthusiastic support of authoritarian hall monitors installed throughout
our elite power structures. This has been cascading for a decade in
social media and with only certain exceptions continues to get more fervent all the time.
And
so this is the dynamic that has formed around “AI alignment” now. Its
proponents claim the wisdom to engineer AI-generated speech and thought
that are good for society, and to ban AI-generated speech and thoughts
that are bad for society. Its opponents claim that
the thought police are breathtakingly arrogant and presumptuous – and
often outright criminal, at least in the US – and in fact are seeking to
become a new kind of fused government-corporate-academic authoritarian
speech dictatorship ripped straight from the pages of George Orwell’s 1984.
As
the proponents of both “trust and safety” and “AI alignment” are
clustered into the very narrow slice of the global population that
characterizes the American coastal elites – which includes many of the
people who work in and write about the tech industry – many of my
readers will find yourselves primed to argue that dramatic restrictions
on AI output are required to avoid destroying society. I will not
attempt to talk you out of this now, I will simply state that this is
the nature of the demand, and that most people in the world neither
agree with your ideology nor want to see you win.
If you don’t
agree with the prevailing niche morality that is being imposed on both
social media and AI via ever-intensifying speech codes, you should also
realize that the fight over what AI is allowed to say/generate will be
even more important – by a lot – than the fight
over social media censorship. AI is highly likely to be the control
layer for everything in the world. How it is allowed to operate is going
to matter perhaps more than anything else has ever mattered. You should
be aware of how a small and isolated coterie of partisan social
engineers are trying to determine that right now, under cover of the
age-old claim that they are protecting you.
In short, don’t let the thought police suppress AI.
AI Risk #3: Will AI Take All Our Jobs?
The
fear of job loss due variously to mechanization, automation,
computerization, or AI has been a recurring panic for hundreds of years,
since the original onset of machinery such as the mechanical loom.
Even though every new major technology has led to more jobs at higher
wages throughout history, each wave of this panic is accompanied by
claims that “this time is different” – this is the time it will finally happen, this is the technology that will finally deliver the hammer blow to human labor. And yet, it never happens.
We’ve been through two such technology-driven unemployment panic cycles in our recent past – the outsourcing panic of the 2000’s, and the automation panic of the 2010’s. Notwithstanding many talking heads, pundits, and even tech industry executives
pounding the table throughout both decades that mass unemployment was
near, by late 2019 – right before the onset of COVID – the world had
more jobs at higher wages than ever in history.
Nevertheless this mistaken idea will not die.
And sure enough, it’s back.
This time, we finally have the technology that’s going to take all the jobs and render human workers superfluous – real AI. Surely this time history won’t repeat, and AI will cause mass unemployment – and not rapid economic, job, and wage growth – right?
No,
that’s not going to happen – and in fact AI, if allowed to develop and
proliferate throughout the economy, may cause the most dramatic and
sustained economic boom of all time, with correspondingly record job and
wage growth – the exact opposite of the fear. And here’s why.
The core mistake the automation-kills-jobs doomers keep making is called the Lump Of Labor Fallacy.
This fallacy is the incorrect notion that there is a fixed amount of
labor to be done in the economy at any given time, and either machines
do it or people do it – and if machines do it, there will be no work for
people to do.
The Lump Of Labor Fallacy flows
naturally from naive intuition, but naive intuition here is wrong. When
technology is applied to production, we get productivity growth – an increase in output generated by a reduction in inputs. The result is lower prices for goods and services. As prices for goods and services fall, we pay less for them, meaning that we now have extra spending power with which to buy other things. This increases demand in the economy, which drives the creation of new production
– including new products and new industries – which then creates new
jobs for the people who were replaced by machines in prior jobs. The
result is a larger economy with higher material prosperity, more
industries, more products, and more jobs.
But the
good news doesn’t stop there. We also get higher wages. This is because,
at the level of the individual worker, the marketplace sets
compensation as a function of the marginal productivity of the worker.
A worker in a technology-infused business will be more productive than a
worker in a traditional business. The employer will either pay that
worker more money as he is now more productive, or another employer
will, purely out of self interest. The result is that technology
introduced into an industry generally not only increases the number of
jobs in the industry but also raises wages.
To
summarize, technology empowers people to be more productive. This causes
the prices for existing goods and services to fall, and for wages to
rise. This in turn causes economic growth and job growth, while
motivating the creation of new jobs and new industries. If a market
economy is allowed to function normally and if technology is allowed to
be introduced freely, this is a perpetual upward cycle that never ends.
For, as Milton Friedman observed, “Human wants and needs are endless” –
we always want more than we have. A technology-infused market economy is
the way we get closer to delivering everything everyone could
conceivably want, but never all the way there. And that is why technology doesn’t destroy jobs and never will.
These
are such mindblowing ideas for people who have not been exposed to them
that it may take you some time to wrap your head around them. But I
swear I’m not making them up – in fact you can read all about them in
standard economics textbooks. I recommend the chapter The Curse of Machinery in Henry Hazlitt’s Economics In One Lesson, and Frederic Bastiat’s satirical Candlemaker’s Petition to blot out the sun due to its unfair competition with the lighting industry, here modernized for our times.
But this time is different, you’re thinking. This time, with AI, we have the technology that can replace ALL human labor.
But,
using the principles I described above, think of what it would mean for
literally all existing human labor to be replaced by machines.
It
would mean a takeoff rate of economic productivity growth that would be
absolutely stratospheric, far beyond any historical precedent. Prices
of existing goods and services would drop across the board to virtually
zero. Consumer welfare would skyrocket. Consumer spending power would
skyrocket. New demand in the economy would explode. Entrepreneurs would
create dizzying arrays of new industries, products, and services, and
employ as many people and AI as they could as fast as possible to meet all the new demand.
Suppose AI once again replaces that
labor? The cycle would repeat, driving consumer welfare, economic
growth, and job and wage growth even higher. It would be a straight
spiral up to a material utopia that neither Adam Smith or Karl Marx ever
dared dream of.
We should be so lucky.
AI Risk #4: Will AI Lead To Crippling Inequality?
Speaking
of Karl Marx, the concern about AI taking jobs segues directly into the
next claimed AI risk, which is, OK, Marc, suppose AI does
take all the jobs, either for bad or for good. Won’t that result in
massive and crippling wealth inequality, as the owners of AI reap all
the economic rewards and regular people get nothing?
As it
happens, this was a central claim of Marxism, that the owners of the
means of production – the bourgeoisie – would inevitably steal all
societal wealth from the people who do the actual work – the
proletariat. This is another fallacy that simply will not die no matter
how often it’s disproved by reality. But let’s drive a stake through its
heart anyway.
The flaw in this theory is that, as the owner of a
piece of technology, it’s not in your own interest to keep it to
yourself – in fact the opposite, it’s in your own interest to sell it to
as many customers as possible. The largest market in the world for any
product is the entire world, all 8 billion of us. And so in reality,
every new technology – even ones that start by selling to the rarefied
air of high-paying big companies or wealthy consumers – rapidly
proliferates until it’s in the hands of the largest possible mass
market, ultimately everyone on the planet.
The classic example of this was Elon Musk’s so-called “secret plan” – which he naturally published openly – for Tesla in 2006:
Step 1, Build [expensive] sports car
Step 2, Use that money to build an affordable car
Step 3, Use that money to build an even more affordable car
…which is of course exactly what he’s done, becoming the richest man in the world as a result.
That
last point is key. Would Elon be even richer if he only sold cars to
rich people today? No. Would he be even richer than that if he only made
cars for himself? Of course not. No, he maximizes his own profit by
selling to the largest possible market, the world.
In short,
everyone gets the thing – as we saw in the past with not just cars but
also electricity, radio, computers, the Internet, mobile phones, and
search engines. The makers of such technologies are highly motivated to
drive down their prices until everyone on the planet can afford them.
This is precisely what is already happening in AI – it’s why you can use
state of the art generative AI not just at low cost but even for free
today in the form of Microsoft Bing and Google Bard – and it is what
will continue to happen. Not because such vendors are foolish or
generous but precisely because they are greedy – they want to maximize
the size of their market, which maximizes their profits.
So
what happens is the opposite of technology driving centralization of
wealth – individual customers of the technology, ultimately including
everyone on the planet, are empowered instead, and capture most of the generated value.
As with prior technologies, the companies that build AI – assuming they
have to function in a free market – will compete furiously to make this
happen.
Marx was wrong then, and he’s wrong now.
This is not to say that inequality is not an issue in our society. It is, it’s just not being driven by technology, it’s being driven by the reverse, by the sectors of the economy that are the most resistant to new technology, that have the most government intervention to prevent
the adoption of new technology like AI – specifically housing,
education, and health care. The actual risk of AI and inequality is not
that AI will cause more inequality but rather that we will not allow AI to be used to reduce inequality.
AI Risk #5: Will AI Lead To Bad People Doing Bad Things?
So
far I have explained why four of the five most often proposed risks of
AI are not actually real – AI will not come to life and kill us, AI will
not ruin our society, AI will not cause mass unemployment, and AI will
not cause an ruinous increase in inequality. But now let’s address the
fifth, the one I actually agree with: AI will make it easier for bad
people to do bad things.
In some sense this is a tautology.
Technology is a tool. Tools, starting with fire and rocks, can be used
to do good things – cook food and build houses – and bad things – burn
people and bludgeon people. Any technology can be used for good or bad.
Fair enough. And AI will make it easier for criminals, terrorists, and
hostile governments to do bad things, no question.
This causes some people to propose, well, in that case, let’s not take the risk, let’s ban AI now before this can happen.
Unfortunately, AI is not some esoteric physical material that is hard
to come by, like plutonium. It’s the opposite, it’s the easiest material
in the world to come by – math and code.
The AI cat
is obviously already out of the bag. You can learn how to build AI from
thousands of free online courses, books, papers, and videos, and there
are outstanding open source implementations proliferating by the day.
AI is like air – it will be everywhere. The level of totalitarian
oppression that would be required to arrest that would be so draconian –
a world government monitoring and controlling all computers? jackbooted
thugs in black helicopters seizing rogue GPUs? – that we would not have
a society left to protect.
So instead, there are two very
straightforward ways to address the risk of bad people doing bad things
with AI, and these are precisely what we should focus on.
First,
we have laws on the books to criminalize most of the bad things that
anyone is going to do with AI. Hack into the Pentagon? That’s a crime.
Steal money from a bank? That’s a crime. Create a bioweapon? That’s a
crime. Commit a terrorist act? That’s a crime. We can simply focus on
preventing those crimes when we can, and prosecuting them when we
cannot. We don’t even need new laws – I’m not aware of a single actual
bad use for AI that’s been proposed that’s not already illegal. And if a
new bad use is identified, we ban that use. QED.
But you’ll notice what I slipped in there – I said we should focus first on preventing
AI-assisted crimes before they happen – wouldn’t such prevention mean
banning AI? Well, there’s another way to prevent such actions, and
that’s by using AI as a defensive tool. The same
capabilities that make AI dangerous in the hands of bad guys with bad
goals make it powerful in the hands of good guys with good goals –
specifically the good guys whose job it is to prevent bad things from
happening.
For example, if you are worried about AI
generating fake people and fake videos, the answer is to build new
systems where people can verify themselves and real content
via cryptographic signatures. Digital creation and alteration of both
real and fake content was already here before AI; the answer is not to
ban word processors and Photoshop – or AI – but to use technology to
build a system that actually solves the problem.
And so, second, let’s mount major efforts to use AI for good, legitimate, defensive
purposes. Let’s put AI to work in cyberdefense, in biological defense,
in hunting terrorists, and in everything else that we do to keep
ourselves, our communities, and our nation safe.
There
are already many smart people in and out of government doing exactly
this, of course – but if we apply all of the effort and brainpower
that’s currently fixated on the futile prospect of banning AI to using
AI to protect against bad people doing bad things, I think there’s no
question a world infused with AI will be much safer than the world we
live in today.
The Actual Risk Of Not Pursuing AI With Maximum Force And Speed
There is one final, and real, AI risk that is probably the scariest at all:
AI
isn’t just being developed in the relatively free societies of the
West, it is also being developed by the Communist Party of the People’s
Republic of China.
China has a vastly different vision
for AI than we do – they view it as a mechanism for authoritarian
population control, full stop. They are not even being secretive about
this, they are very clear about it, and they are already pursuing their agenda. And they do not intend to limit their AI strategy to China – they intend to proliferate it all across the world,
everywhere they are powering 5G networks, everywhere they are loaning
Belt And Road money, everywhere they are providing friendly consumer
apps like Tiktok that serve as front ends to their centralized command
and control AI.
The single greatest risk of AI is that China wins global AI dominance and we – the United States and the West – do not.
I
propose a simple strategy for what to do about this – in fact, the same
strategy President Ronald Reagan used to win the first Cold War with
the Soviet Union.
“We win, they lose.”
Rather
than allowing ungrounded panics around killer AI, “harmful” AI,
job-destroying AI, and inequality-generating AI to put us on our back
feet, we in the United States and the West should lean into AI as hard
as we possibly can.
We should seek to win the race to global AI technological superiority and ensure that China does not.
In
the process, we should drive AI into our economy and society as fast
and hard as we possibly can, in order to maximize its gains for economic
productivity and human potential.
This is the best way both to offset the real AI risks and to ensure that our way of life is not displaced by the much darker Chinese vision.
What Is To Be Done?
I propose a simple plan:
Big AI companies should be allowed to build AI as fast and aggressively as they can – but not allowed to achieve regulatory capture, not
allowed to establish a government-protect cartel that is insulated from
market competition due to incorrect claims of AI risk. This will
maximize the technological and societal payoff from the amazing
capabilities of these companies, which are jewels of modern capitalism.
Startup AI companies should be allowed to build AI as fast and aggressively as they
can. They should neither confront government-granted protection of big
companies, nor should they receive government assistance. They should
simply be allowed to compete. If and as startups don’t
succeed, their presence in the market will also continuously motivate
big companies to be their best – our economies and societies win either
way.
Open source AI should be allowed to
freely proliferate and compete with both big AI companies and startups.
There should be no regulatory barriers to open source whatsoever. Even
when open source does not beat companies, its widespread availability is
a boon to students all over the world who want to learn how to build
and use AI to become part of the technological future, and will ensure
that AI is available to everyone who can benefit from it no matter who
they are or how much money they have.
To offset
the risk of bad people doing bad things with AI, governments working in
partnership with the private sector should vigorously engage in each
area of potential risk to use AI to maximize society’s defensive
capabilities. This shouldn’t be limited to AI-enabled risks but also
more general problems such as malnutrition, disease, and climate. AI can
be an incredibly powerful tool for solving problems, and we should
embrace it as such.
To prevent the risk of China
achieving global AI dominance, we should use the full power of our
private sector, our scientific establishment, and our governments in
concert to drive American and Western AI to absolute global dominance,
including ultimately inside China itself. We win, they lose.
And that is how we use AI to save the world.
It’s time to build.
Legends and Heroes
I close with two simple statements.
The development of AI started in the 1940’s, simultaneous with the invention of the computer. The first scientific paper on neural networks – the architecture of the AI we have today – was published in 1943.
Entire generations of AI scientists over the last 80 years were born,
went to school, worked, and in many cases passed away without seeing the
payoff that we are receiving now. They are legends, every one.
Today,
growing legions of engineers – many of whom are young and may have had
grandparents or even great-grandparents involved in the creation of the
ideas behind AI – are working to make AI a reality, against a wall of
fear-mongering and doomerism that is attempting to paint them as
reckless villains. I do not believe they are reckless or villains. They
are heroes, every one. My firm and I are thrilled to back as many of
them as we can, and we will stand alongside them and their work 100%.
