OpenAI's Joshua Achiam warns the Fable dispute could normalize electronic citizenship verification for software

The digital universe is a wild west from the perspective of states. It makes states feel threatened; it allows freely flowing information and commerce that is hard to trace or regulate. The urge to build digital firewalls exists and hasn't manifested fully. But it could.

Not enough people being wise, patient, and thoughtful in this moment. Too many people putting on war paint and seeing issues du jour as the important battle lines. No. The stage is way bigger.

I am afraid that bringing this up at all is an infohazard, but I am also quite worried that many well-intentioned people are burning bridges and blind to the danger of doing so.

If the private sector doesn't navigate with grace the boundaries and limits of its own powers - and respect the powers rightfully and duly appointed to elected governments - it can provoke the use of extraordinary powers to overcome private intransigence.

@jachiam0 europe gets all of the bad externalities (depressed kids, higher suicide rates) and none of the profit (social media/tech companies are all us). they absolutely add user verification like crazy. its as common sense there as not letting kids smoke cigarettes

@jachiam0 This reminds me of the Soviet Union: a country built on privilege lists, where everything, from the class of hotel you could stay in to how many sausages you were allowed to buy, depended on your rung in the hierarchy.

@jachiam0 This already happened with crypto

@twtfayta @jachiam0 Is there any evidence that bans help?

@jachiam0 citizenship verification is terrible as it is, but identity verification is worse. And we lost control over the latter more than a decade ago.

@jachiam0 You guys already do this for API access though?? I had to upload my ID to some random company to get GPT-5 access. And Altman wants biometric verification of ID with the world coin stuff…

@jachiam0 Very well said👏 but makes a foreign national even more concerned 😮‍💨

@jachiam0 Agree, though I suspect the noise was a ruse to get there, rather than a trigger.

@jachiam0 @NathanpmYoung It’s coming.

@jachiam0 it’s inevitable that content gates based on various factors will exist (although in this case I think it’s a bad idea), they have to be cryptographic and trustless (like zkPassport) and not a centralized registry

Time to lean into privacy-preserving programmable cryptography

@jachiam0 Some very thoughtful and smart lawyers have actually analyzed this issue. We do not live in a dictatorship. You keep assuming there's some sort of rulebook that if we all follow, things will be great. It doesn't exist. It's legally arbitrary and based on personal vendettas.

@jachiam0 I really wish you would look in the mirror. You act as if you are the only one seeing clearly, when you are blind to the fact that the powers the government is exercising are illegitimate in their application. Bowing down blindly to unchecked authority is not brave.

@jachiam0 You're not an arbiter of wisdom or thoughtfulness, you're trying to build a for-profit super intelligence

That's allegorically unwise

I'd think of what you're doing as lobbing dynamite into the snowpack

Expect an avalanche

@jachiam0 Right, and in the words of the pope there's building Babel and there's building the temple. I wonder what the regulated world will get us, but I fear it will be worse than the old path, esp with what Britian, Canada, and the US are doing.

@NathanpmYoung @jachiam0 Australia ban has a 30-40% rate for getting kids off all social media, higher for getting rid of some (but not all) accounts. evidence that it helps is clear, but they're still getting lobbied to death out there for a reversal

@jachiam0 Does this episode at all reduce your confidence that we will successfully align digital supergod?