A collection of Silicon Valley notables, including Elon Musk, just signed an open letter urging at least a six-month pause in large-scale A.I. experiments to allow our safety protocols to catch up
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Generally, when human beings turn against a technology or move to restrain it, we have a good idea of what we’re afraid of happening, what kind of apocalypse we’re trying to forestall. The nuclear test ban treaties came after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, not before.
Or a less existential example: The current debate about limiting kids’ exposure to social media is potent because we’ve lived with the internet and the iPhone for some time; we know a lot about what the downsides of online culture seem to be. Whereas it’s hard to imagine persuading someone to pre-emptively regulate TikTok in the year 1993.
There are certainly groups of people—that I fully respect—who have long pushed for drastic measures to be taken towards AI alignment.
There are others—programmers, marketers, and other white collar workers—who have felt a sudden plunge in job their security. That is legitimately scary and I can not criticize them for feeling nervous.
There is a third group—employees and executives at large tech companies—that are uncomfortable about the current trajectory of AI for an entirely different reason: they feel left behind.
The letter feels like that third group taking advantage of the anxieties of the first two. Any development “pause” that would result from this would only give competing companies time to catch up to OpenAI.