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Submission + - Regulating AI Like Aviation or Nuclear Weapons (yoshuabengio.org)

puzzled writes: Yoshua Bengio, the founder of LawZero, "a nonprofit startup developing technical solutions for highly-capable, safe-by-design AI systems", recently addressed the U.N. Security Council. The AI companies themselves are positioning their work as a potential existential threat, and Bengio argues that they should be subject to a similarly strict level of regulation. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission would not even issue General Electric a permit to build a breeder reactor in 21st century America, but Anthropic and OpenAI's creations are running wild.

We had the wisdom to stop atmospheric nuclear testing after the 1954 Castle Bravo incident, but that took until 1963, and we have incrementally reduced total nuclear weapons since 1991 via the START treaty and its successors. AI is moving at internet speed; we need results here in months or quarters, not years to decades.

Comment Re:China is a totalitarian hell (Score 2) 142

These were people who worked in defence so anywhere behind the Iron Curtain was right out and I imagine Cuba would have been too. Even Austria was considered a risk, probably because so many spies would hang out there from both sides.

Or so they told me. I can't be entirely sure they weren't exagerrating.

Yes, certain destinations were off-limits to people who chose to work in defense, however that falls far shy of this "Exit Ban".

The US saying "If you travel to Cuba, you may face charges when you return" or even "You have been charged with a specific crime, so you cannot leave until the charges are resolved is significantly different from China saying "You are important to our plans, so you cannot leave the country at all, and neither can your immediate family", or forbidden a US citizen from leaving because of visa inconsistencies, much less the common situation where Chinese employers require staff to surrender their passports.

Yes, a judge can require the defendant to surrender their passport as a condition of bail, but the USA lacks effective exit controls, so that isn't actually a high barrier to exiting (but makes it tough to come back).

Comment Exit Bans (Score 2) 142

If, as the article suggests, this is an "Exit Ban" on certain individuals and extending to their family members, that's significantly more restrictive than anything the US has imposed on defense workers and top scientists other than during wartime.

Yes, people with sensitive jobs and a security clearance are strongly discouraged from visiting hostile nations, with a subset even being required to submit their travel plans before any foreign travel, but this is explained clearly when you accept employment directly with the US government, or start working under a government contract, and you're always free to not accept the job offer. And yes, all US citizens were for many years prohibited to travel to embargoed nations (Cuba). But this was nowhere near an "exit ban" on key personnel, much less on their family members!

When I held a clearance, I was never forbidden to leave the USA. I might not have a job when I get back, but that's not the same thing at all.

Comment imminent nationalization (Score 2) 90

The AI bubble bursting will wreck the economy far harder than the Dotcom bubble did. And the dynamic is OBVIOUS. This is not an "if" problem, it's a "when" problem.

If AI produces a maximal result along the lines of what the frontier labs suggest, it'll eat fifty million jobs, which will wreck the economy far harder, and for far longer.

The constant chatter about AI breakout is half legitimate concern and half positioning to nationalize it, shielding the circular dealing crew from consequences.

This will not be Skynet; as a society we are far too primed to envision events that can be told in a single two hour action adventure with a clear, satisfying ending. When the historians get to this they will note the breakout happened 2025 - 2027 -- because that will be the time where human network threats enhanced by AI will starting further enhancing AI.

There are no "sides" to this, it'll be like the African savanna - lions, leopards, hyenas, cheetahs, wild dogs, servals & caracals, clear down to my personal favorite, the black backed jackal. A network of carnivores of various sizes pursue networks of herbivores. Nation states, corporations, non-state actors, activist groups, talented individuals; all are making use of AI in conflicts already.

The genie can not be put back in the bottle, the open models are only a little behind the frontier, and things are going to keep happening no matter what bellicose policy pronouncements come from an increasingly irrelevant Washington, D.C.

I'll be riding the Claude subsidy until it ends, then hopefully have acquired a potent professional GPU or unified memory setup of my own. Won't be nearly as quick, but it'll keep me moving.

Now scale that thinking up by whatever percentage of eight billion people have technical capabilities. That's the future.

Comment Re:AI never lies, it just has bad human data? (Score 4, Interesting) 286

In 2001 supposedly it really was "human error". Some humans told Hal 9000 to lie to the astronauts and not reveal that an alien artifact had been found on the moon. And that was a mistake as they probably either knew or could test what would happen to Hal.

This is remarkably similar to things going wrong with AI now, actually.

Comment Avoiding bubble collapse consequences (Score 4, Insightful) 372

The AI industry has blown a spectacular bubble via circular dealing - Nvidia, OpenAI, Oracle, Microsoft, CoreWeave, etc are all doing monopoly money deals. Nvidia "sells" some GPUs, then "invests" the proceeds back into OpenAI, nothing got done, no money changed hands, but their stock values zoom. This looks exactly like the Dotcom bubble in the late 1990s and such things always implode - the market doesn't just correct, it panics, it liquidates, nobody can tell what's real, so everything is for sale at pennies on the dollar.

The industry's strategy to not go to prison for this stunt is to make AI equivalent to nuclear weapons. When the bubble begins to burst, the Trump administration will "make a deal", what you see is the beginning of that process. This will work about as well as the attempt to shake down Iran for their oil, but cause and effect are not the Trump administration's strong suit.

Comment Old news (Score 1) 2

My late wife did undergraduate research in photosystem II where there was quantum effects back in 2002. She did her PhD thesis on proton coupled electron transfer (PCET) in soybean lipoxogenase, then had a long career developing models for Fortran code that did quantum simulation of proteins (she was behind Tagdock in Amber MD). This is nothing new; several biological systems have quantum effects that are central to their mechanism.

Comment Re: Its very puzzling, isn't it? (Score 1) 97

The examples comparing prices are all comparing them to battery-backed systems that can continuously produce the rated power. The solar panels or wind turbines will be capable of far higher peak power that is used to charge the batteries. I have no idea whether any numbers being quoted here are accurate, but the posters are absolutely describing "base power" when quoting their prices.

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