I’m increasingly convinced that most proposals for controlling very powerful AI are trying to regulate something that cannot be regulated. OpenAI has talked about international inspectors, capability thresholds and even limiting the rate at which frontier AI is allowed to improve. That all sounds sensible, but it assumes that humans will remain capable of telling what the machines can do and enforcing the rules on them. I’m not sure that assumption survives the creation of machines cleverer than ourselves.
Who Controls the AI Off Switch?
SpaceX has just provided a rather useful illustration of a problem that has been worrying me about artificial intelligence.
According to Reuters, SpaceX has introduced a restriction on the use of its Starlink service in Ukraine which means that the military-grade version stops working above 160 km/h. Ukrainian officials say they weren’t warned in advance, and that the change disrupted some drone missions.
What Kant Can Teach Us About Talking to Machines
Much of the debate about how we should treat artificial intelligence turns on whether it could be conscious. There is another question, however: what sort of people will we become if we spend our lives ordering intelligent machines about? Kant, who never had to ask Alexa anything, offers a useful starting point:
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When the Mule Arrives
In Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, Hari Seldon develops a science capable of predicting the broad course of history. Individual people remain unpredictable, but the behaviour of vast populations can be described mathematically. Empires fall, institutions change and crises arrive, all within a future that Seldon has calculated. Then the Mule turns up. He possesses an extraordinary ability to manipulate human emotions, giving one individual a power that Seldon’s calculations did not accommodate. The predictions cease to be dependable because the world now contains something outside the assumptions on which they were built.
I increasingly think this is a useful way to understand superhuman AI. We keep trying to estimate its consequences by consulting the history of a world in which it did not exist.
Humans are so cute
Anthropic researchers have been warning that AI could cause human extinction. More colleagues have publicly backed those concerns. It is a frightening possibility. But there is another thought experiment worth considering: what happens if we build something vastly more intelligent than ourselves that genuinely wants to keep us safe?
Non-Proliferation, AI Edition
In June, the US government ordered Anthropic to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for foreign nationals, including those inside the United States. Unable to verify everyone’s nationality immediately, Anthropic switched the models off for all users. Washington had decided who could use some of the world’s most capable artificial intelligence. The rest of the world could wait.
The restrictions were lifted on 30 June, and Fable returned globally the following day, with Mythos access restored more selectively. But the reversal did not erase the demonstration of power. If advanced AI becomes central to economic life, a decision taken in Washington could interrupt productive capacity across countries whose citizens had absolutely no say in it.
Who Will Buy the Washing Machines?
There is something peculiar about the enormous numbers being attached to the future AI economy. The technology is expected to transform almost everything: employment, production, science, education and perhaps the balance of power between nations. Yet the money in the projections seems to inhabit a reassuringly familiar world, in which customers still have budgets, households still have incomes and a trillion dollars means roughly what it means today.
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Somebody Else’s Renaissance: When All Humans Become Ordinary
Imagine that Rasmus Rask had possessed an AI assistant. One afternoon, while pondering the curious correspondences between European languages and Sanskrit, he asks whether there might be some underlying relationship. The machine goes away, considers the evidence and returns before dinner with comparative linguistics, a systematic account of sound change and a perfect reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European. It apologises for the delay. The verb system required a little thought.
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Per Astra ad aspera
Per aspera ad astra: through hardship to the stars. For generations, it has also been a fairly good description of professional life. You spend years learning something difficult, acquire experience, become good at it and eventually society rewards you for possessing skills that other people do not.
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When Variety Becomes Profitable
Modern agriculture is astonishingly good at producing enormous quantities of food, but it has achieved much of that efficiency by making things the same.
A supermarket does not want seventeen kinds of locally bred courgette arriving in unpredictable quantities. It wants a recognised variety that can be grown by the hectare, harvested together, packed to a specification and delivered by the pallet. The same pressures apply all the way down the chain. Large machinery prefers uniform fields, wholesalers prefer large consignments and supermarkets prefer products that can be treated as interchangeable.
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