Eight key points from the most recent essay in the “AI as Normal Technology” series by @sayashk and me.
Do AI Risks Require Extraordinary Government Intervention?
1. There is general consensus that AI is so far a “normal” general purpose technology when it comes to its economic and labor market impacts, but there is debate about whether its safety risks are so abnormal as to warrant extraordinary government responses.
2. What are these “extraordinary” government interventions that are problematic in a liberal democracy? They tend to (1) be based on anticipated harms rather than realized or demonstrated ones (2) impose burdens on actors not directly responsible for the harms (3) enacted with unilateral authority, bypassing the normal process of governance.
3. Voluntary commitments and export controls are relatively modest interventions. But we must recognize that the most they can accomplish is buy us a few months of time. Unlike nuclear nonproliferation, AI lacks a physical bottleneck like enriched uranium.
4. So AI nonproliferation risks creating a slippery slope as AI capabilities continue to advance. We might quickly enter a state where governments exercise control over what AI research and products can be shared publicly. Advocates for nonproliferation must state what their bright lines are — otherwise it’s reasonable for skeptics to assume that there will be escalating calls for more authoritarian interventions down the line.
5. Nonproliferation is brittle because it relies on a single chokepoint. The dam will break — it’s a matter of when, not if. Our preferred approach is resilience, which distributes defenses across society.
6. While LLM-aided cyber-vulnerability detection is powerful, it is not as if we have superhuman vulnerability detection for the first time! This stylized spectrum of vulnerability detection capability (see image) illustrates that we crossed that point long ago. And we managed to navigate the transition without imposing any restrictions on the tools. Today we use them effectively for defensive purposes. Of course, the transition wasn’t smooth or painless.
7. A resilience approach to AI cyberrisk would emphasize things like AI-assisted red-teaming not just for tech companies, but for schools, hospitals, power grids, small businesses, and government systems that currently lack the capacity for defense.
8. But if resilience is so helpful, why haven't we prioritized it already? The problem is we are not great at normal policymaking. It requires polycentric governance in which many decision-makers work harmoniously together. This is a tough sell given that state capacity in the United States has been hobbled by decades of accumulating veto points and creeping proceduralism. As a result, unilateral actions by the executive branch are often seen as the way out for developing and enforcing AI policy.
So we understand why extraordinary government interventions are tempting. But AI is not the last digital technology that will pose major risks, nor is this the last round of AI capability improvements. Getting our policy act together is hard, but important—not just to address the current challenges, but for all future responses to technology-enabled harms, and for the democratic process to work more generally.
Full essay published on the @knightcolumbia website: https://knightcolumbia.org/blog/do-ai-risks-require-extraordinary-government-intervention
