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governments are providing you with safe, clean water, roadways, basic standards of food safety, protection from enemies, disaster prevention and relief, and soc
by felixgallo 2y ago
governments are providing you with safe, clean water, roadways, basic standards of food safety, protection from enemies, disaster prevention and relief, and social services beyond the feasible scope of charity. They may suck at many things, but existential risk (even if just civilizational shift owing to mass-produced disinformation) is a great place to point a government at.
- XorNot 2y agoThe issue with those things is we actually know how to measure success for most of them, and they notably work best when the politicians stay the hell out of the process other then setting broad directions. There's no equivalent for AI research, and a lot of temptation to try and find simple metrics which mean safe - and it's appealing. Water should be below X ppm contaminant is "easy" to establish. AI should be <blank> to be safe?
- AlbertCory 2y agoI don't get the feeling you read the link. But thanks.
- XorNot 2y agoWhat is your definition of what makes an AI system dangerous or safe? How would this be measured or standardized? Not vagueries, not "well superintelligence should be regulated". A company owns a 100,000 Nvidia GPUs. What are you implementing? What physical actions are the people enforcing this policy going to take? Someone, somewhere will be at a computer entering commands, or writing code, or looking at data. What will it be?
- AlbertCory 2y agoare you asking me? I'm not the one with the government program.
- samatman 2y agoThe person you're snarking at is not replying to you, and is under no obligation to read your Substack before posting.
- AlbertCory 2y ago> They may suck at many things Exactly. I gave examples of actual tech projects undertaken by governments, so an abstract discussion of "government vs. private industry" is not really on point here.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- phs318u 2y agoYou're attacking a straw man. Where governments do well is establishing a regulatory framework. They don't deliver the clean water. They (should) ensure that the water that's delivered meets a standard.
- Hizonner 2y agoIn every single city I've ever lived in or paid attention to, the water system has been directly operated by employees of the municipal government, not private companies and not even contractors. And the regional projects they buy from tend to be pure government, too. Oh, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_privatization#Prevalence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_privatization#Prevalence But, hey, never let facts interfere with your deeply held religious beliefs, eh?
- AlbertCory 2y agoyou're the only one talking about water.
- phs318u 2y agoNot where I live friend. Water, electricity and gas are all privatised. EDITED: to make the point - please don't assume everyone here lives in the US.
- AlbertCory 2y agoNo, you're attacking something without even reading it. The "bipartisan coalition" in the Senate is determined to spend $32 billion (just a downpayment, for sure) is not planning to do what you want. They want to hand out money to a lot of universities, NGO's, and bureaucrats. In your terms, they want to deliver the clean water. A "regulatory framework" would be something like the Dodd-Frank bill, or Sarbanes-Oxley. Maybe that's what you want, but it's not what Schumer is pushing.