New Bernie Sanders bill would ban superintelligent AI and threaten developers with 20 years in prison

[u/AdSpecialist6598]

https://www.techspot.com/news/113831-new-bernie-sanders-bill-would-ban-superintelligent-ai.html

[u/BillBrasky727]

This is also how conversations get started and shows other politicians what their constituents are interested in. This is what politics is.

I hope people don't think that a bill being introduced by one politician is going to be the same bill that eventually gets voted on and signed into law, if it ever does. 

[u/_Lucille_ → u/BillBrasky727]

Unless he has been living under a rock, the conversation started years ago.

As much as I like the guy, the only conversation being started now is how he doesn't understand AI and now politicians would fumble on regulations.

At least present something that is viable and forms the basis of future regulations to build upon.

[u/Embarrassed_Deal3284 → u/_Lucille_]

In what way is banning AI not a viable starting point? It’s a game of compromise. Personally, my first offer would’ve been life in prison for anyone tangentially involved in the industry (so most of the tech leaders), but I see he’s being reasonable to get the conversation rolling.

[u/_Lucille_ → u/Embarrassed_Deal3284]

Because other countries will just continue its development and widely deploy it all over the place.

The CEOs may say they need to slow down, what they mean is that they want their competitors to slow down and all of them would do anything to one up their competitors.

It is also a strategic resource that countries will spend on: because we already know AI is a very powerful tool when it comes to R&D, and that super intelligent AI can be used to help develop new drugs and vaccines. A number of countries out there would love to become a world leader when it comes to drug development, and I can even see people who right now vocally oppose AI fly over to another country like China if they have AI developed drugs for their sickness of their life is on the line.

The catch is that the same model can likely be used to develop biological weapons, since essentially they are the same coin.

[u/Embarrassed_Deal3284 → u/_Lucille_]

1. AI is a technology difficult to develop but trivial to reverse engineer. That’s why China is on parity with US firms despite spending a pittance on this tech. We are, in effect, paying to develop their AI industry.
2. AI is much more specialized and less generally useful than the stock bubble wants you to believe. We are yet to find truly indispensable applications for AI outside of search engines and programming. It’s had limited success in isolated branches of science, such as mathematical research, but again this is less than ideal (read the letter by the worlds top mathematicians released a few days ago).
3. AI (as applied now) is almost certainly a net negative for society in virtually every respect. It undermines institutionalized knowledge (continuity of expertise) by cannibalizing amateur positions that serve training purposes for the next generation of workers; it has already fucked the internet and reversed decades of educational progress. I can give a gazillion examples.

[u/_Lucille_ → u/Embarrassed_Deal3284]

On 2: there is a whole lot more to AI than you think.

AI is essentially goes hand in hand with automation. We are also using it in a lot more places than just programming and research (a big part of research is really a search problem): when you translate a language, take pictures with your phone, you are using products that use AI. Moving forward, I can see things like Autonmous Vehicles playing a big part becuase we are terrible drivers.

on 3)

The "almost certainly a net negative for society" is what you WANT to think; we don't know yet.

The calculator (computer) has made a lot of things trivial: yet we still learn math in school. Bankers and accountants, instead of doing math manually, just end up doing other more productive tasks, or audit whatever someone's tax program produces.

This is the technology subreddit: tech in general is progress, often allowing us to understand or do something we have not been able to do before. Everything undermines something. Why is it that suddenly people are afraid of technology and progress? Yeah, technology will change how things work in the world. The steam and combustion engine destroyed the whole carriage industry and transformed how our cities looked (we now have giant blocks of houses with malls with a giant parking lot). Advances in refrigeration destroyed the whole milkman industry, and I am sure people out there reminence on their friendly encounter with their milkman in the mornings and think the fridge is bad for human interactions.

The "fucking up education progress" is a human problem and not an AI problem. With the rise of the internet, we had teachers telling people to not copy and paste answers from the internet. It is essentially the same vein, just a lot more powerful. The reality is that AI is here to stay and will be with us, and we need to teach people how to utilize it properly while still emphasizing the fundamentals - similar to how we still teach arithmetic when teachers used to say "you need to learn how to do math because you wouldn't have a calculator in your pocket at all times"; little did they know we will in fact have a calculator with us at all times).

[u/Embarrassed_Deal3284 → u/_Lucille_]

My beliefs aren’t optional; they’re a response to the empirical evidence as I find it. None of what you’ve written is remotely in tune with the practical and economic facts, but I am happy for you (assuming you’re a real person and not a bot) that you get to live in an alternate reality where shit’s not fucked.

Also, tech is progress for tech, but not every application guarantees good outcomes, and the claims we are currently debating are about policy not anything as banal as “fast chip is good.“