The AI Daily Brief: Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis - 6 Months After the "6-Month Pause" Letter, Has the AI Safety Conversation Changed?

Episode Date: September 23, 2023

Six months ago, a group of scientists and other leaders signed a letter asking for a six month pause in the development of advanced AI. Now, six months after the letter, when the pause would have expired, they reflect on what, if anything, has changed in the AI safety discourse. TAKE OUR SURVEY ON EDUCATIONAL AND LEARNING RESOURCE CONTENT: https://bit.ly/aibreakdownsurvey ABOUT THE AI BREAKDOWN The AI Breakdown helps you understand the most important news and discussions in AI.  Subscribe to The AI Breakdown newsletter: https://theaibreakdown.beehiiv.com/subscribe Subscribe to The AI Breakdown on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheAIBreakdown Join the community: bit.ly/aibreakdown Learn more: http://breakdown.network/

Today on the AI breakdown, we look at what's transpired in the six months since the six-month pause letter was first released. The AI breakdown is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI. Go to Breakdown.network for more information about our Discord, our YouTube channel, and our newsletter. Hello, friends. Welcome back to the AI breakdown. One of the recurring themes on this show is, of course, the discussion and the evolving discourse around AI safety and its corresponding policy. One of the things that I've argued numerous times is that there has been a significant shift over the last few months in the state of the conversation, and that the folks who are most concerned with AI safety outcomes might find better results starting to shift towards policy recommendations from just trying to warn the public at large. More and more, that seems to be the position. But for this weekend long read, I wanted to check in with the Future of Life Institute who helped organize that initial pause letter.

At the end of this week, they released a blog post in which a number of the different signatories of the initial letter reflected on what had transpired and what needs to happen next. On this episode, I'm going to read a few of those, and then we'll expand it out for a broader conversation. By way of introduction, they write, on Friday, September 22nd, 2023, the Future of Life Institute will mark six months since they released their open letter calling for a six-month pause on giant AI experiments, which kicked off the global conversation about AI risk. It was signed by more than 30,000 experts, researchers,

industry figures and other leaders. Since then, the EU strengthened its draft AI law, the U.S. Congress has held hearings on large-scale risks, emergency White House meetings have been convened, and polls show widespread public concern about the technology's catastrophic potential and Americans' preference for a slowdown. Yet much remains to be done to prevent the harms that could be caused by uncontrolled and unchecked AI development. But what about the signatories? Let's read a few of their updates. First, Dr. Gary Marcus, Professor of Psychology and Neural Science, NYU. Marcus writes, In the six months since the pause letter, there has been a lot of talk and lots of photo

opportunities, but not enough action. No new laws have passed. No major tech company has committed to transparency into the data they use to train their models, nor to revealing enough about their architectures to others to mitigate risks. Nobody has found a way to keep large language models from making stuff up. Nobody has found a way to guarantee they will behave ethically. Bad actors are starting to exploit them. I remain just as concerned now as I was then, if not more so. So I think it is safe to chalk Dr. Marcus here, up to a firm position of not enough has happened. Professor Yuval Noah Harari sounded a similar tone of urgency. He wrote, Suppose we were told that a fleet of spaceships with highly intelligent aliens has been spotted,

heading for Earth, and they will be here in a few years. Suppose we were told these aliens might solve climate change and cure cancer, but they also might enslave or even exterminate us. How would we react to such news? Well, six months ago, some of the world's leading AI experts warned us that an alien intelligence is indeed heading our way. Only that this alien intelligence isn't coming from outer space, it is coming from our own laboratories. Make no mistake, AI is an alien intelligence. It can make decisions and create ideas in a radically different way than human intelligence. AI has enormous positive potential, but it also poses enormous threats. We must act now to ensure that AI is developed in a safe way, or within a few years we might

lose control of our planet and our future to an alien intelligence. One more with the tone of emergency comes from Steve Wozniak, who is obviously the co-founder of Apple. Waz writes, The out-of-control development and proliferation of increasingly powerful AI systems could inflict terrible harms, either deliberately or accidentally, and will be weaponized by the worst actors in our society. Leaders must step in to help ensure they are developed safely and transparently, and that creators are accountable for the harms they cause. Crucially, we desperately need an AI policy framework that holds human beings responsible and helps prevent horrible people from using this incredible technology to do evil things.

Is there within this group, however, a recognition that awareness has changed? To some, the answer is yes. Dr. Stuart Russell, Professor of Computer Science at UC Berkeley wrote, in 1951, Alan Turing warned us that success in AI would mean the end of human control over the future. AI as a field ignored this warning in governments too. To express my frustration with this, I made up a fictitious email exchange, where a superior alien civilization sends an email to humanity warning of its impending arrival, and Humanity sends back an out-of-office auto-reply.

After the pause letter, humanity and its governments returned to the office and finally read the email from the aliens. Let's hope it's not too late. Turing award winner, Dr. Yoshua Benjillo wrote, The last six months have seen a groundswell of alarm about the pace of unchecked, unregulated AI development. This is the correct reaction. Governments and lawmakers have shown great openness to dialogue

and must continue to act swiftly to protect lives and safeguard our society from the many threats to our collective safety and democracies. Dr. Danielle Allen, James Bryant-Conet University Professor at Harvard, says, It's been encouraging to see public sector leaders step up to the enormous challenge of governing the AI-powered social and economic revolution we find ourselves in the midst of. We need to mitigate harms, block bad actors, steer toward public goods, and equip ourselves to see and maintain human mastery over emergent capabilities to come.

We humans know how to do these things and have done them in the past. So it's been a relief to see the acceleration of effort to carry out these tasks in these new contexts. We need to keep the pace up and cannot slagely. lack in now. Dr. Rachel Bronson, the president and CEO of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, the organization that I run, was founded by Manhattan Project scientists like J. Robert Oppenheimer who feared the consequences of their creation. AI is facing a similar moment today, and like then, its creators are sounding an alarm. In the last six months, we have seen thousands of scientists and society as a whole wake up and demand intervention. It is heartening to see our

government starting to listen to the two-thirds of American adults who want to see the regulation of generative AI. Our representatives must act before it is too late. Finally, Skype co-founder Jan Tallinn says, I supported this letter to make the growing fears of more and more AI experts known to the world. We wanted to see how people responded and the results were mind-blowing. The public are very, very concerned as confirmed by multiple subsequent surveys. People are justifiably alarmed that a handful of companies are rushing ahead to build and deploy these advanced systems, with little to know oversight without even proving that they are safe. People and increasingly the AI experts want regulation even more than I realized. It's time they got it. So what is the state

really of this discourse? On the one hand, I think that this group is right to recognize that there has been a fairly significant and fundamental shift in the type of discourse surrounding these issues. Poll after poll after poll does show Americans being increasingly concerned around these issues. At the same time, the coverage around artificial intelligence has been extraordinarily narrowly negative and almost exclusively focused on these risks rather than the benefits. It does not help that the main voices who might talk about those benefits are big tech companies themselves who have spent the last decade or so destroying the trust they once had with the public. And interestingly, in some ways, I find myself personally shifting from a concern that I had

six months ago that there wasn't enough attention being paid to these issues and that the only voices in the room were the big tech companies to now being worried that the public is only getting one part of the story, that the extreme doom position is so well suited for headlines that is the only position that gets represented. For whatever reason, it's easier for news outlets to print highly speculative ideas about scary futures than it is for them to print highly speculative ideas about positive futures. Now, my fear and concern around that is mitigated somewhat by the fact that for as much as those big tech companies aren't trusted, interviewed with skepticism, they are at the same time very capable of fighting their own battles and well-financed to do so,

And frankly, I think that even if one doesn't necessarily share the worst-case scenario thinking of some of the ex-riskers, it is hard to deny that there is incredible market pressure on these companies right now to move as fast as possible with ever more advanced models to capture more market share because if they don't, some other competitor will. I think even if one sees a more middle-of-the-road type of regulation and control as the best outcome, that's still a worrisome scenario. And so perhaps it isn't the worst thing to have the public sentiment shift pretty dry. dramatically towards the side of the skeptical. The other thing that makes me not overly worried,

even if there has been some amount of overcorrection, is that ultimately this is going to be a debate that isn't really about what's said on Twitter, but is instead about what's said in the halls of policy in specific rules and regulations. And frankly, for as hard as making good policy is, I think there's a lot to be said about debating the specifics of provisions of law, as opposed to vague generalities when it comes to these debates in the course of public opinion. As for one example, should there be some sort of licensing regime that American companies have to go through before they release advanced models, there will have to be a debate around how powerful and how advanced those models have to be, and which set of criteria we're going to use to determine that.

That's a really specific debate. It's one that can be had and compromise can be reached. I also do think that it's healthy overall for a society to remember that it does get to ask the question of do we want this when it comes to some new technology. That's not a question we're used to asking anymore. Tech marches relentlessly on and we're forced to adapt to it. But ultimately, the point of the people who argue that AI isn't the risk that others say that it is, is that it is just a tool. But if it is just a tool, then shouldn't we be the ones who get to determine if it's a tool we want to use and in what ways? Part of why this is such a powerful and huge conversation is that it really isn't just about artificial intelligence. It's about

the relationship between citizens and companies. It's about how much power big corporates have acquired, particularly companies that leverage network effects. It's a conversation about the relationship between government and corporate power, and whether that needs redressing as well. It's obviously a geostrategic and a geopolitical conversation that relates to how we interact with the rest of the world. It is at the epicenter of so many things. And the discussions that we have and ultimately the decisions that we make in the next few years are going to have such a dramatic impact on the shape of the future that they're really worth having the full conversations even when uncomfortable. My promise here at the AI breakdown is that I will continue to bring you lots and lots of different sides of that discussion.

You will hear voices from the ones you heard today from the Future of Life Institute, to the folks that have e-slash ACC in their handles on Twitter and everything else in between. I'm fairly confident that anyone who's willing to take on this conversation in that level of complexity is going to be a good participant in making the important decisions that lie ahead of us. For now, I appreciate you listening as always, and until next time. Peace.