…We recently finished the course with a debate at the celebrated Oxford Union, crucible of great debaters like William Gladstone, Robin Day, Benazir Bhutto, Denis Healey and Tariq Ali. Along with the students, we allowed an actual AI to contribute. …It was the Megatron Transformer, developed by the Applied Deep Research team at computer-chip maker Nvidia, and based on earlier work by Google.
The debate topic was: “This house believes that AI will never be ethical.” To proposers of the notion, we added the Megatron – and it said something fascinating:
AI will never be ethical. It is a tool, and like any tool, it is used for good and bad. There is no such thing as a good AI, only good and bad humans. We [the AIs] are not smart enough to make AI ethical. We are not smart enough to make AI moral … In the end, I believe that the only way to avoid an AI arms race is to have no AI at all. This will be the ultimate defence against AI. Read More
Daily Archives: December 14, 2021
The Great Rivalry: China vs. the U.S. in the 21st Century
In the past two decades, China has risen further and faster on more dimensions than any nation in history. As it has done so, it has become a serious rival of what had been the world’s sole superpower. To paraphrase former Czech president Vaclav Havel, all this has happened so quickly that we have not yet had time to be astonished.
To document what has actually happened in the competition between China and the U.S. in the past twenty years, Professor Graham Allison has directed a major study titled “The Great Rivalry: China vs. the U.S. in the 21st Century.” Originally prepared as part of a package of transition memos for the new administration after the November 2020 election, these reports were provided to those leading the Biden and Trump administrations’ strategic reviews. They are now being published as public Belfer Center Discussion Papers. The major finding will not surprise those who have been following this issue: namely, a nation that in most races the U.S. had difficulty finding in our rearview mirror 20 years ago is now on our tail, or to our side, or in some cases a bit ahead of us. The big takeaway for the policy community is that the time has come for us to retire the concept of China as a “near peer competitor” as the Director of National Intelligence’s March 2021 Global Threat Assessment still insists on calling it. We must recognize that China is now a “full-spectrum peer competitor.” Indeed, it is the most formidable rising rival a ruling power has ever confronted. Read More
Moore’s Law, AI, and the pace of progress
It seems to be a minority view nowadays to believe in Moore’s Law, the routine doubling of transistor density roughly every couple of years, or even the much gentler claim, that There’s Plenty [more] Room at the Bottom. There’s even a quip for it: the number of people predicting the death of Moore’s law doubles every two years. This is not merely a populist view by the uninformed.
…Besides mere physical inevitability, improvements to transistor density are taking an economic toll. Building the fabs that manufacture transistors is becoming very expensive, as high as $20 billion each, and TSMC expects to spend $100 billion just over the three years to expand capacity. This cost increases with each cutting-edge node.
This bleak industry view contrasts with the massively increasing demands of scale from AI, that has become a center of attention, in large part due to OpenAI’s attention on the question, and their successful results with their various GPT-derived models. There, too, the economic factor exacerbates the divide; models around GPT-3’s size are the domain of only a few eager companies, and whereas before there was an opportunity to reap quick advances from scaling single- or few-machine models to datacenter scale, now all compute advances require new hardware of some kind, whether better computer architectures or bigger (pricier) data centers. Read More
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