Dario Amodei: recommendation

Transcript context

…I’m concerned about a world where if you just consider the pace of progress you’re expecting, the life cycle of legislation... The benefits are, as you say because of diffusion lag, slow enough that I really do think this patchwork of state laws, on the current trajectory, would prohibit. I mean if having an emotional chatbot friend is something that freaks people out, then just imagine the kinds of actual benefits from AI we want normal people to be able to experience. From improvements in health and healthspan and improvements in mental health and so forth. Whereas at the same time, it seems like you think the dangers are already on the horizon and I just don’t see that much… It seems like it would be especially injurious to the benefits of AI as compared to the dangers of AI. So that’s maybe where the cost benefit makes less sense to me. 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.…

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