Sam Hammond of the Foundation for American Innovation published his 95 Theses on AI last week. I believe that this post, like some of Hammond’s other writing, suffers from misplaced negativity and overconfidence in some assertions (biology, for example, is always more complicated than you think). …[T]here is one of the theses that deserves greater attention, about regulatory approaches to AI:
The dogma that we should only regulate technologies based on “use” or “risk” may sound more market-friendly, but often results in a far broader regulatory scope than technology-specific approaches (see: the EU AI Act)
Zvi Moshowitz picked up on this too: …”When you regulate ‘use’ or ‘risk’ you need to check on everyone’s ‘use’ of everything, and you make a lot of detailed micro interventions, and everyone has to file lots of paperwork and do lots of dumb things, and the natural end result is universal surveillance and a full ‘that which is not compulsory is forbidden’ regime across much of existence.”
… This is a serious misunderstanding. — Read More
Daily Archives: May 15, 2024
Where Does China Stand in the AI Wave?
Debates and discussions by Western public intellectuals on AI governance are closely followed in China. Whenever prominent figures like Sam Altman, Joshua Bengio, or Stuart Russell give interviews, multiple Chinese media outlets swiftly translate and analyze their remarks.
English-speaking audiences, however, seldom engage with the AI governance perspectives offered by Chinese public intellectuals.
In this article, ChinaTalk presents the highlights and a full translation of a panel discussion on AI (archived here) that took place six weeks ago in Beijing. Hosted by the non-profit organization “The Intellectual” 知识分子 — whose public WeChat account serves as a platform for discussions on scientific issues and their governance implications — the panelists delved into a wide range of topics, including:
— the state of China’s AI industry, discussing the biggest bottlenecks, potential advantages in AI applications, and the role of the government in supporting domestic AI development;
— the technical aspects of AI, such as whether Sora understands physics, the reliance on the Transformer architecture, and how far we are from true AGI;
— and the societal implications — which jobs will be replaced by AI first, whether open- or closed-source is better for AI safety, and if AI developers should dedicate more resources to AI safety. — Read More
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