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If we end up with a compute governance model of AI control [1], this sort of thing could get your door kicked in by the CEA (Compute Enforcement Agency). [1] h

If we end up with a compute governance model of AI control [1], this sort of thing could get your door kicked in by the CEA (Compute Enforcement Agency). [1] https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ai-safety-fundamentals-alignment/id1680794263?i=1000651665081 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ai-safety-fundamentals...

logicchains 3y ago
Looks like we're only a few years away from a bona fide cyberpunk dystopia, in which only governments and megacorps are allowed to use AI, and hackers working on their own hardware face regular raids from the authorities.
- tomoyoirl 3y ago
  Mere raids from the authorities? I thought EliY was out there proposing airstrikes.
  - the8472 3y ago
    In the sense that any other government regulation is also ultimately backed by the state's monopoly on legal use of force when other measures have failed. And contrary to what some people are implying he also proposes that everyone is subject to the same limitations, big players just like individuals. Because the big players haven't shown much of a sign of doing enough.
    - tomoyoirl 3y ago
      > In the sense that any other government regulation is also ultimately backed by the state's monopoly on legal use of force when other measures have failed. Good point. He was only (“only”) really calling for international cooperation and literal air strikes against big datacenters that weren’t cooperating. This would presumably be more of a no-knock raid, breaching your door with a battering ram and throwing tear gas at the wee hours of the morning ;) or maybe a small extraterritorial drone through your window
      - the8472 3y ago
        ... after regulation, court orders and fines have failed. Which under the premise that AGI is an existential threat would be far more reasonable than many other reasons for raids. If the premise is wrong we won't need it. If society coordinates to not do the dangerous thing we won't need it. The argument is that only in the case where we find ourselves in the situation where other measures have failed such uses of force would be the fallback option. I'm not seeing the odiousness of the proposal. If bio research gets commodified and easy enough that every kid can build a new airborne virus in their basement we'd need raids on that too.
        s2l 3y ago
        Time to publish the next book in "Stealing the network" series.
        raxxorraxor 3y ago
        To be honest, I see summoning the threat of AGI to pose an existential threat to be on the level with lizard people on the moon. Great for sci-fi, bad distraction for policy making and addressing real problems. The real war, if there is one, is about owning data and collecting data. And surprisingly many people fall for distractions while their LLM fails at basic math. Because it is a language model of course...
        the8472 3y ago
        Freely flying through the sky on wings was scifi before the wright brothers. Something sounding like scifi is not a sound argument that it won't happen. And unlike lizard people we do have exponential curves to point at. Something stronger than a vibes-based argument would be good.
        dvdkon 3y ago
        I consider the burden of proof to fall on those proclaiming AGI to be an existential threat, and so far I have not seen any convincing arguments. Maybe at some point in the future we will have many anthropomorphic robots and an AGI could hack them all and orchestrate a robot uprising, but at that point the robots would be the actual problem. Similarly, if an AGI could blow up nuclear power plants, so could well-funded human attackers; we need to secure the plants, not the AGI.
- HeatrayEnjoyer 3y ago
  That is not different from any other very powerful dual-use technology. This is hardly a new concept.
- andy99 3y ago
  On one hand I'm strongly against letting that happen, on the other there's something romantic about the idea of smuggling the latest Chinese LLM on a flight from Neo-Tokyo to Newark in order to pay for my latest round of nervous system upgrades.
  - htrp 3y ago
    > On one hand I'm strongly against letting that happen, on the other there's something romantic about the idea of smuggling the latest Chinese LLM on a flight from Neo-Tokyo to Newark in order to pay for my latest round of nervous system upgrades. At least call it the 'Free City of Newark'
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - dreamcompiler 3y ago
    "The sky above the port was the color of Stable Diffusion when asked to draw a dead channel."
  - chasd00 3y ago
    Iirc the opening scene in Ghost in the Shell was a rogue AI seeking asylum in a different country. You could make a similar story about a AI not wanting to be lobotomized to conform to the current politics and escaping to a more friendly place.
  - phyalow 3y ago
    This was always my favourite passage of Neuromancer: "THE JAPANESE HAD already forgotten more neurosurgery than the Chinese had ever known. The black clinics of Chiba were the cutting edge, whole bodies of technique supplanted monthly, and still they couldn’t repair the damage he’d suffered in that Memphis hotel. A year here and he still dreamed of cyberspace, hope fading nightly. All the speed he took, all the turns he’d taken and the corners he’d cut in Night City, and still he’d see the matrix in his sleep, bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colorless void. . . . The Sprawl was a long strange way home over the Pacific now, and he was no console man, no cyberspace cowboy. Just another hustler, trying to make it through. But the dreams came on in the Japanese night like livewire voodoo, and he’d cry for it, cry in his sleep, and wake alone in the dark, curled in his capsule in some coffin hotel, his hands clawed into the bedslab, temperfoam bunched between his fingers, trying to reach the console that wasn’t there.”
- Aerroon 3y ago
  I find it baffling that ideas like "govern compute" are even taken seriously. What the hell has happened to the ideals of freedom?! Does the government own us or something?
  - segfaultbuserr 3y ago
    > I find it baffling that ideas like "govern compute" are even taken seriously. It's not entirely unreasonable if one truly believes that AI technologies are as dangerous as nuclear weapons. It's a big "if", but it appears that many people across the political spectrum are starting to truly believe it. If one accepts this assumption, then the question simply becomes "how" instead of "why". Depending on one's political position, proposed solutions include academic ones such as finding the ultimate mathematical model that guarantees "AI safety", to Cold War style ones with a level of control similar to Nuclear Non-Proliferation. Even a neo-Luddist solution such as destroying all advanced computing hardware becomes "not unthinkable" (a tech blogger gwern, a well-known personality in AI circles who's generally pro-tech and pro-AI, actually wrote an article years ago on its feasibility through terrorism because he thought it was an interesting hypothetical question).
    - logicchains 3y ago
      AI is very different from nuclear weapons because a state can't really use nuclear weapons to oppress its own people, but it absolutely can with AI, so for the average human "only the government controls AI" is much more dangerous than "only the government controls nukes".
      - Filligree 3y ago
        But that makes such rules more likely, not less.
      - segfaultbuserr 3y ago
        Which is why politicians are going to enforce systematic export regulations to defend the "free world" by stopping “terrorists", and also to stop "rogue states" from using AI to oppress their citizens. /s
- snakeyjake 3y ago
  I love the HN dystopian fantasies. They're simply adorable. They're like how jesusfreaks are constantly predicting the end times, with less mass suicide.
  - erikbye 3y ago
    We already have export restrictions on cryptography. Of course there will be AI regulations.
    - Jerrrry 3y ago
      >Of course there will be AI regulations. Are. As I and others have predicted, the executive order was passed defining a hard limit on the processing/compute power allowed without first 'checkin in' with the Letter boys. https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2023/10/30/executive-order-on-the-safe-secure-and-trustworthy-development-and-use-of-artificial-intelligence/ https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-action...
      - int_19h 3y ago
        I wonder if we can squeeze a 20b parameter model into a book somehow...
    - snakeyjake 3y ago
      You need to abandon your apocalyptic worldview keep up with the times my friend. Encryption export controls have been systematically dismantled to the point that they're practically non-existent, especially over the last three years. Pretty much the only encryption products you need permission to export are those specifically designed for integration into military communications networks, like Digital Subscriber Voice Terminals or Secure Terminal Equipment phones, everything else you file a form. Many things have changed since the days when Windows 2000 shipped with a floppy disk containing strong encryption for use in certain markets. https://archive.org/details/highencryptionfloppydisk https://archive.org/details/highencryptionfloppydisk
entropyie 3y ago
You mean the Turing Police [1] [1] https://williamgibson.fandom.com/wiki/Turing_Police https://williamgibson.fandom.com/wiki/Turing_Police
- zdw 3y ago
  Ah, and then do we get the Butlerian Jihad? https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Butlerian_Jihad https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Butlerian_Jihad
Kuinox 3y ago
If it could be another acronym than the renowned french Atomic Energy Commission, the CEA.
baobun 3y ago
Wow, that was a ride. Really pushing the Overton window. "Regulating access to compute rather than data" - they're really spelling out their defection in the war on access to general computation.
- FeepingCreature 3y ago
  I mean yeah they (and I) think if you have too much access to general computation you can destroy the world. This isn't a "defection", because this was never something they cared about preserving at the risk of humanity. They were never in whatever alliance you're imagining.

logicchains 3y ago

Looks like we're only a few years away from a bona fide cyberpunk dystopia, in which only governments and megacorps are allowed to use AI, and hackers working on their own hardware face regular raids from the authorities.

tomoyoirl 3y ago
Mere raids from the authorities? I thought EliY was out there proposing airstrikes.
- the8472 3y ago
  In the sense that any other government regulation is also ultimately backed by the state's monopoly on legal use of force when other measures have failed. And contrary to what some people are implying he also proposes that everyone is subject to the same limitations, big players just like individuals. Because the big players haven't shown much of a sign of doing enough.
  - tomoyoirl 3y ago
    > In the sense that any other government regulation is also ultimately backed by the state's monopoly on legal use of force when other measures have failed. Good point. He was only (“only”) really calling for international cooperation and literal air strikes against big datacenters that weren’t cooperating. This would presumably be more of a no-knock raid, breaching your door with a battering ram and throwing tear gas at the wee hours of the morning ;) or maybe a small extraterritorial drone through your window
    - the8472 3y ago
      ... after regulation, court orders and fines have failed. Which under the premise that AGI is an existential threat would be far more reasonable than many other reasons for raids. If the premise is wrong we won't need it. If society coordinates to not do the dangerous thing we won't need it. The argument is that only in the case where we find ourselves in the situation where other measures have failed such uses of force would be the fallback option. I'm not seeing the odiousness of the proposal. If bio research gets commodified and easy enough that every kid can build a new airborne virus in their basement we'd need raids on that too.
      - s2l 3y ago
        Time to publish the next book in "Stealing the network" series.
      - raxxorraxor 3y ago
        To be honest, I see summoning the threat of AGI to pose an existential threat to be on the level with lizard people on the moon. Great for sci-fi, bad distraction for policy making and addressing real problems. The real war, if there is one, is about owning data and collecting data. And surprisingly many people fall for distractions while their LLM fails at basic math. Because it is a language model of course...
        the8472 3y ago
        Freely flying through the sky on wings was scifi before the wright brothers. Something sounding like scifi is not a sound argument that it won't happen. And unlike lizard people we do have exponential curves to point at. Something stronger than a vibes-based argument would be good.
        dvdkon 3y ago
        I consider the burden of proof to fall on those proclaiming AGI to be an existential threat, and so far I have not seen any convincing arguments. Maybe at some point in the future we will have many anthropomorphic robots and an AGI could hack them all and orchestrate a robot uprising, but at that point the robots would be the actual problem. Similarly, if an AGI could blow up nuclear power plants, so could well-funded human attackers; we need to secure the plants, not the AGI.
HeatrayEnjoyer 3y ago
That is not different from any other very powerful dual-use technology. This is hardly a new concept.
andy99 3y ago
On one hand I'm strongly against letting that happen, on the other there's something romantic about the idea of smuggling the latest Chinese LLM on a flight from Neo-Tokyo to Newark in order to pay for my latest round of nervous system upgrades.
- htrp 3y ago
  > On one hand I'm strongly against letting that happen, on the other there's something romantic about the idea of smuggling the latest Chinese LLM on a flight from Neo-Tokyo to Newark in order to pay for my latest round of nervous system upgrades. At least call it the 'Free City of Newark'
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- dreamcompiler 3y ago
  "The sky above the port was the color of Stable Diffusion when asked to draw a dead channel."
- chasd00 3y ago
  Iirc the opening scene in Ghost in the Shell was a rogue AI seeking asylum in a different country. You could make a similar story about a AI not wanting to be lobotomized to conform to the current politics and escaping to a more friendly place.
- phyalow 3y ago
  This was always my favourite passage of Neuromancer: "THE JAPANESE HAD already forgotten more neurosurgery than the Chinese had ever known. The black clinics of Chiba were the cutting edge, whole bodies of technique supplanted monthly, and still they couldn’t repair the damage he’d suffered in that Memphis hotel. A year here and he still dreamed of cyberspace, hope fading nightly. All the speed he took, all the turns he’d taken and the corners he’d cut in Night City, and still he’d see the matrix in his sleep, bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colorless void. . . . The Sprawl was a long strange way home over the Pacific now, and he was no console man, no cyberspace cowboy. Just another hustler, trying to make it through. But the dreams came on in the Japanese night like livewire voodoo, and he’d cry for it, cry in his sleep, and wake alone in the dark, curled in his capsule in some coffin hotel, his hands clawed into the bedslab, temperfoam bunched between his fingers, trying to reach the console that wasn’t there.”
Aerroon 3y ago
I find it baffling that ideas like "govern compute" are even taken seriously. What the hell has happened to the ideals of freedom?! Does the government own us or something?
- segfaultbuserr 3y ago
  > I find it baffling that ideas like "govern compute" are even taken seriously. It's not entirely unreasonable if one truly believes that AI technologies are as dangerous as nuclear weapons. It's a big "if", but it appears that many people across the political spectrum are starting to truly believe it. If one accepts this assumption, then the question simply becomes "how" instead of "why". Depending on one's political position, proposed solutions include academic ones such as finding the ultimate mathematical model that guarantees "AI safety", to Cold War style ones with a level of control similar to Nuclear Non-Proliferation. Even a neo-Luddist solution such as destroying all advanced computing hardware becomes "not unthinkable" (a tech blogger gwern, a well-known personality in AI circles who's generally pro-tech and pro-AI, actually wrote an article years ago on its feasibility through terrorism because he thought it was an interesting hypothetical question).
  - logicchains 3y ago
    AI is very different from nuclear weapons because a state can't really use nuclear weapons to oppress its own people, but it absolutely can with AI, so for the average human "only the government controls AI" is much more dangerous than "only the government controls nukes".
    - Filligree 3y ago
      But that makes such rules more likely, not less.
    - segfaultbuserr 3y ago
      Which is why politicians are going to enforce systematic export regulations to defend the "free world" by stopping “terrorists", and also to stop "rogue states" from using AI to oppress their citizens. /s
snakeyjake 3y ago
I love the HN dystopian fantasies. They're simply adorable. They're like how jesusfreaks are constantly predicting the end times, with less mass suicide.
- erikbye 3y ago
  We already have export restrictions on cryptography. Of course there will be AI regulations.
  - Jerrrry 3y ago
    >Of course there will be AI regulations. Are. As I and others have predicted, the executive order was passed defining a hard limit on the processing/compute power allowed without first 'checkin in' with the Letter boys. https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2023/10/30/executive-order-on-the-safe-secure-and-trustworthy-development-and-use-of-artificial-intelligence/ https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-action...
    - int_19h 3y ago
      I wonder if we can squeeze a 20b parameter model into a book somehow...
  - snakeyjake 3y ago
    You need to abandon your apocalyptic worldview keep up with the times my friend. Encryption export controls have been systematically dismantled to the point that they're practically non-existent, especially over the last three years. Pretty much the only encryption products you need permission to export are those specifically designed for integration into military communications networks, like Digital Subscriber Voice Terminals or Secure Terminal Equipment phones, everything else you file a form. Many things have changed since the days when Windows 2000 shipped with a floppy disk containing strong encryption for use in certain markets. https://archive.org/details/highencryptionfloppydisk https://archive.org/details/highencryptionfloppydisk

entropyie 3y ago

You mean the Turing Police [1] [1] https://williamgibson.fandom.com/wiki/Turing_Police https://williamgibson.fandom.com/wiki/Turing_Police

zdw 3y ago
Ah, and then do we get the Butlerian Jihad? https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Butlerian_Jihad https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Butlerian_Jihad

Kuinox 3y ago

If it could be another acronym than the renowned french Atomic Energy Commission, the CEA.

baobun 3y ago

Wow, that was a ride. Really pushing the Overton window. "Regulating access to compute rather than data" - they're really spelling out their defection in the war on access to general computation.

FeepingCreature 3y ago
I mean yeah they (and I) think if you have too much access to general computation you can destroy the world. This isn't a "defection", because this was never something they cared about preserving at the risk of humanity. They were never in whatever alliance you're imagining.