LW - AI Regulation is Unsafe by Maxwell Tabarrok

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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: AI Regulation is Unsafe, published by Maxwell Tabarrok on April 22, 2024 on LessWrong.
Concerns over AI safety and calls for government control over the technology are highly correlated but they should not be.
There are two major forms of AI risk: misuse and misalignment. Misuse risks come from humans using AIs as tools in dangerous ways. Misalignment risks arise if AIs take their own actions at the expense of human interests.
Governments are poor stewards for both types of risk. Misuse regulation is like the regulation of any other technology. There are reasonable rules that the government might set, but
omission bias and incentives to protect small but well organized groups at the expense of everyone else will lead to lots of costly ones too. Misalignment regulation is not in the Overton window for any government. Governments do not have strong incentives to care about long term, global, costs or benefits and they do have strong incentives to push the development of AI forwards for their own purposes.
Noticing that AI companies put the world at risk is not enough to support greater government involvement in the technology. Government involvement is likely to exacerbate the most dangerous parts of AI while limiting the upside.
Default government incentives
Governments are not social welfare maximizers. Government actions are an amalgam of the actions of thousands of personal welfare maximizers who are loosely aligned and constrained. In general, governments have strong incentives for
myopia, violent competition with other governments, and negative sum transfers to small, well organized groups. These exacerbate existential risk and limit potential upside.
The vast majority of the costs of existential risk occur outside of the borders of any single government and beyond the election cycle for any current decision maker, so we should expect governments to ignore them.
We see this expectation fulfilled in governments reactions to other long term or global externalities e.g debt and climate change. Governments around the world are happy to impose trillions of dollars in
direct cost and substantial default risk on future generations because costs and benefits on these future generations hold little sway in the next election. Similarly, governments
spend billions subsidizing fossil fuel production and ignore potential solutions to global warming, like a carbon tax or geoengineering, because the
long term or extraterritorial costs and benefits of climate change do not enter their optimization function.
AI risk is no different. Governments will happily trade off global, long term risk for national, short term benefits. The most salient way they will do this is through military competition. Government regulations on private AI development will not stop them from racing to integrate AI into their militaries.
Autonomous drone warfare is already happening in Ukraine and Israel. The US military has contracts with
Palantir and
Andruil which use AI to augment military strategy or to power weapons systems. Governments will want to use AI for
predictive policing, propaganda, and other forms of population control.
The case of nuclear tech is informative. This technology was strictly regulated by governments, but they still raced with each other and used the technology to create the most
existentially risky weapons mankind has ever seen. Simultaneously, they cracked down on civilian use. Now, we're in a world where all the major geopolitical flashpoints have at least one side armed with nuclear weapons and where the nuclear power industry is worse than stagnant.
Government's military ambitions mean that their regulation will preserve the most dangerous misuse risks from AI. They will also push the AI frontier and train larger models, so we will still face misalignment risks. These may ...