5 ms·

How can policy keep up with AI advances?

34 points by robertwiblin 8y ago

apocalypstyx 8y ago
Perhaps the real question is not whether we will survive the AI apocalypse, but whether we will survive the existential tsunami that will probably pour forth if we fail to build God and devoid of a God that could be dug out of the past or created in the future, humanity is, in a way never before known, condemned to be free and everything is rendered impossible.
- dragonsky67 8y ago
  sorry, you lost me after the second comma. Were you trying to say that we are going to be in trouble with the plebs if we don't manage to create an all powerful AI for them to treat like God?
scottlocklin 8y ago
Great, another PR piece by the mountebank clown car at "OpenAI" trying to tell us the singularity is upon us, but please send us billions of investment dollars so we can make it so and protect you from evil.
- mises 8y ago
  The worst part is that it's not just OpenAI, the politicians figured out this is a good way to draw votes. The right does it to draw the rust belt, and the left to draw the urban poor.
deleted 8y ago
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- deleted 8y ago
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currymj 8y ago
I miss the days when it was unfashionable to call things "AI". It forced people to think more clearly, and it made the models used sound to normal people like boring applications of numerical optimization, which is pretty accurate. It's not something a normal person should feel any sense of excitement about, any more than they should care about a new type of satellite dish or whatever -- you have to be a pretty odd duck to find it intrinsically interesting.
- jjcm 8y ago
  AI is definitely a loaded word. We have years upon years of built up fictional worlds created on the basis of a dystopian future put in place by AI gone wrong. It's understandable - AI is an enemy that no country will be offended by (as opposed to say, Goldeneye, which vilifies Russia), is unknown enough that suspension of disbelief is easy, and allows for an easy plot device. Sadly, the decisions around AI will likely be based on those pieces of fiction. The average person has spent more time watching movies about AI rather than reading actual research material on it, and will vote accordingly. We should really refrain from using "AI" as a term until artificial general intelligence is actually upon us. Using it to refer to GANs or Deep Convolutional Networks is just feeding the news beast. In addition to changing the terminology though, I think it's also important to change the fiction as well. Project Hieroglyph[1] is one of my favourite efforts in the realm of fiction - it aims to combine scientific papers with fictional stories that represent those advances in a clear and accurate way. If people are going to make decisions based on fiction, we should at least keep the fiction accountable to being realistic and accurate. [1] https://hieroglyph.asu.edu/ https://hieroglyph.asu.edu/
snrji 8y ago
It's very simple: do NOT legislate. Stop regulating every single detail. Instead, focus on making sure that the fundamental principles (fundamental rights, trade...) are respected. Those principles will probably be the same in 30 years than they were 50 years ago, or at least very similar. There are very basic functions that the legislative power is still missing. Still, they want to regulate on super advanced topics up to the most specific details.
- carlmr 8y ago
  Also I think we can learn from software engineering. The higher in the architecture you go, the more stable everything needs to be. Globals are bad etc. That's why you should minimize top-level regulation (e.g. EU, US level). And make regulation as local as possible. Localizing regulation allows for faster changes and better adapted regulations to what people want. It also allows for A/B testing regulation, before rolling it out to the masses. Take health care as an example. The US has a lot of red and blue states. Most people in red states don't want public health care, most people in blue states want public health care. On the other hand the more people you have in a health care system the better the risk pooling. So you don't want it to be too local (e.g. district level). So for effective regulation the federal level is wrong. The federal level should neither make a public health system nor interfere with lower level decisions to have one. But states might be a good level to start with. That way you could have public health care in blue states quickly. The red states would stay out of it. This would also allow for better A/B Testing. Texas might see their neighbors in California faring better or worse now and then either Texas or California may change their mind about it. This would even make it possible that the public insurer in Vermont is maybe more efficient than the one in California. Now if you allow people in California to buy Vermont public insurance, you could even create competition that keeps the public system more healthy. It would make getting a majority easier. Because the more local you get, the easier it is to make decisions. And if you say this is too much load on local regulators. My proposal would be that the federal level provides a default, and states can override that default. Cities/Counties can override state defaults, etc. This way you always get the most accurate. Most democratic decision. This would also limit the effectiveness of lobbying, because the price of bribing more and more local politicians would become ineffective in many more cases.

34 points by robertwiblin 8y ago

Perhaps the real question is not whether we will survive the AI apocalypse, but whether we will survive the existential tsunami that will probably pour forth if we fail to build God and devoid of a God that could be dug out of the past or created in the future, humanity is, in a way never before known, condemned to be free and everything is rendered impossible.

dragonsky67 8y ago
sorry, you lost me after the second comma. Were you trying to say that we are going to be in trouble with the plebs if we don't manage to create an all powerful AI for them to treat like God?

scottlocklin 8y ago

Great, another PR piece by the mountebank clown car at "OpenAI" trying to tell us the singularity is upon us, but please send us billions of investment dollars so we can make it so and protect you from evil.

mises 8y ago
The worst part is that it's not just OpenAI, the politicians figured out this is a good way to draw votes. The right does it to draw the rust belt, and the left to draw the urban poor.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

currymj 8y ago

I miss the days when it was unfashionable to call things "AI". It forced people to think more clearly, and it made the models used sound to normal people like boring applications of numerical optimization, which is pretty accurate. It's not something a normal person should feel any sense of excitement about, any more than they should care about a new type of satellite dish or whatever -- you have to be a pretty odd duck to find it intrinsically interesting.

jjcm 8y ago
AI is definitely a loaded word. We have years upon years of built up fictional worlds created on the basis of a dystopian future put in place by AI gone wrong. It's understandable - AI is an enemy that no country will be offended by (as opposed to say, Goldeneye, which vilifies Russia), is unknown enough that suspension of disbelief is easy, and allows for an easy plot device. Sadly, the decisions around AI will likely be based on those pieces of fiction. The average person has spent more time watching movies about AI rather than reading actual research material on it, and will vote accordingly. We should really refrain from using "AI" as a term until artificial general intelligence is actually upon us. Using it to refer to GANs or Deep Convolutional Networks is just feeding the news beast. In addition to changing the terminology though, I think it's also important to change the fiction as well. Project Hieroglyph[1] is one of my favourite efforts in the realm of fiction - it aims to combine scientific papers with fictional stories that represent those advances in a clear and accurate way. If people are going to make decisions based on fiction, we should at least keep the fiction accountable to being realistic and accurate. [1] https://hieroglyph.asu.edu/ https://hieroglyph.asu.edu/

snrji 8y ago

It's very simple: do NOT legislate. Stop regulating every single detail. Instead, focus on making sure that the fundamental principles (fundamental rights, trade...) are respected. Those principles will probably be the same in 30 years than they were 50 years ago, or at least very similar. There are very basic functions that the legislative power is still missing. Still, they want to regulate on super advanced topics up to the most specific details.

carlmr 8y ago
Also I think we can learn from software engineering. The higher in the architecture you go, the more stable everything needs to be. Globals are bad etc. That's why you should minimize top-level regulation (e.g. EU, US level). And make regulation as local as possible. Localizing regulation allows for faster changes and better adapted regulations to what people want. It also allows for A/B testing regulation, before rolling it out to the masses. Take health care as an example. The US has a lot of red and blue states. Most people in red states don't want public health care, most people in blue states want public health care. On the other hand the more people you have in a health care system the better the risk pooling. So you don't want it to be too local (e.g. district level). So for effective regulation the federal level is wrong. The federal level should neither make a public health system nor interfere with lower level decisions to have one. But states might be a good level to start with. That way you could have public health care in blue states quickly. The red states would stay out of it. This would also allow for better A/B Testing. Texas might see their neighbors in California faring better or worse now and then either Texas or California may change their mind about it. This would even make it possible that the public insurer in Vermont is maybe more efficient than the one in California. Now if you allow people in California to buy Vermont public insurance, you could even create competition that keeps the public system more healthy. It would make getting a majority easier. Because the more local you get, the easier it is to make decisions. And if you say this is too much load on local regulators. My proposal would be that the federal level provides a default, and states can override that default. Cities/Counties can override state defaults, etc. This way you always get the most accurate. Most democratic decision. This would also limit the effectiveness of lobbying, because the price of bribing more and more local politicians would become ineffective in many more cases.