Dwarkesh Patel: belief

Transcript context

…So there’s a few things here. People talk about there being thousands of these state laws. First of all, the vast, vast majority of them do not pass. The world works a certain way in theory, but just because a law has been passed doesn’t mean it’s really enforced. The people implementing it may be like, “Oh my God, this is stupid. It would mean shutting off everything that’s ever been built in Tennessee.” Very often, laws are interpreted in a way that makes them not as dangerous or harmful. On the same side, of course, you have to worry if you’re passing a law to stop a bad thing; you have this problem as well. My basic view is that if we could decide what laws were passed and how things were done—and we’re only one small input into that—I would deregulate a lot of the stuff around the health benefits of AI. I don’t worry as much about the chatbot laws. I actually worry more about the drug approval process, where I think AI models are going to greatly accelerate the rate at which we discover drugs, and the pipeline will get jammed up. The pipeline will not be prepared to process all the stuff that’s going through it. I think reform of the regulatory process should bias more towards the fact that we have a lot of things coming where the safety and efficacy is actually going to be really crisp and clear, a beautiful thing, and really effective. Maybe we don’t need all this superstructure around it that was designed around an era of drugs that barely work and often have serious side effects. At the same time, I think we should be ramping up quite significantly the safety and security legislation. Like I’ve said, starting with transparency is my view of trying not to hamper the industry, trying to find the right balance. I’m worried about it. Some people criticize my essay for saying, “That’s too slow. The dangers of AI will come too soon if we do that.” Well, basically, I think the last six months and maybe the next few months are going to be about transparency. Then, if these risks emerge when we’re more certain of them—which I think we might be as soon as later this year—then I think we need to act very fast in the areas where we’ve actually seen the risk. I think the only way to do this is to be nimble. Now, the legislative process is normally not nimble, but we need to emphasize the urgency of this to everyone involved. That’s why I’m sending this message of urgency. That’s why I wrote Adolescence of Technology. I wanted policymakers, economists, national security professionals, and decision-makers to read it so that they have some hope of acting faster than they would have otherwise. Is there anything you can do or advocate that would make it more certain that the benefits of AI are better instantiated? I feel like you have worked with legislatures to say, “Okay, we’re going to prevent bioterrorism here. We’re going to increase transparency, we’re going to increase whistleblower protection.” But I think by default, the actual benefits we’re looking forward to seem very fragile to different kinds of moral panics or political economy problems. I don’t actually agree that much regarding the developed world. I feel like in the developed world, markets function pretty well. When there’s a lot of money to be made on something and it’s clearly the best available alternative, it’s actually hard for the regulatory system to stop it. We’re seeing that in AI itself. A thing I’ve been trying to fight for is export controls on chips to China. That’s in the national security interest of the US. That’s squarely within the policy beliefs of almost everyone in Congress of both parties. The case is very clear. The counterarguments against it, I’ll politely call them fishy. Yet it doesn’t happen and we sell the chips because there’s so much money riding on it. That money wants to be made. In that case, in my opinion, that’s a bad thing. But it also applies when it’s a good thing. So if we’re talking about drugs and benefits of the technology, I am not as worried about those benefits being hampered in the developed world. I am a little worried about them going too slow. As I said, I do think we should work to speed the approval process in the FDA. I do think we should fight against these chatbot bills that you’re describing. Described individually, I’m against them. I think they’re stupid. But I actually think the bigger worry is the developing world, where we don’t have functioning markets and where we often can’t build on the technology that we’ve had. I worry more that those folks will get left behind. And I worry that even if the cures are developed, maybe there’s someone in rural Mississippi who doesn’t get it as well. That’s a smaller version of the concern we have in the developing world. So the things we’ve been doing are working with philanthropists. We work with folks who deliver medicine and health interventions to the developing world, to sub-Saharan Africa, India, Latin America, and other developing parts of the world. That’s the thing I think that won’t happen on its own.…

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