Brad Carson: preference

Transcript context

…We have this feeling that it's inevitable, though. That that that we are in this kind of arms race. Right? Where we're And and this what I wanna ask you about is is this an accurate feeling or not? I'm saying like, the folks in the server or whatnot is that there's an arms race. There's an AI arms race between, you know, the powers in the world. And it almost feels sometimes like there is no the genie's out of the bottle. There is no stopping it. Is that true or or is it and and for example, suppose The US says, okay, look, we're, you know, we have a r I, they they they've got a lot of wisdom, we've we've baked that into the the policy, you know, maybe we've got this 5 second rule or or other things where there's humans in the loop in a meaningful way. Like some meaningful way they're in the loop, but now are they slowing down the speed of war? You know, if if if an if an opposing country doesn't care, like, about the heat map problems and doesn't have these limitations, is that a is that a fundamental really limitation and the ability of The United States to defend itself? Like, how does this play out? I would say it's not true. And it's a dangerous thing to believe. But it's very common. Okay. You have this kind of fatalism. Like, it is what it is, and we have to accept it. I'd say a couple of things about that. First, just about the domain of war. We've had many things we could do. We choose not to. We have treaties that prohibit biological weapons, chemical weapons. We've banned through the Geneva Conventions things like dumb dumb bullets, you know, many other weapon systems. They were quite effective. Right? We chose not to use them in some way. And that's, you know, because the rule of military is not to press technology to its outer limit, to like utter destruction. There's like humane concerns that most people in the military take very, very seriously. We have a great example of this. We do regulate war. We have whole people, whole conventions about POWs and how you have to treat them. All these things are, you know, friction on the war effort. Right? That I have to, like I can't just shoot you when I find you on the battlefield if you surrender. If you're holding your hands up, if you're a wounded person, I can't just kill you. It'd be a hell of a lot easier, much more efficient for the invasion if I could just shoot you in spot. Know, they they used to do that. They could move it. Just walk around the battlefield and, yeah, and just, you know, just take out the wounded. Right? But In ancient times. But we now have laws and international conventions that used to at least be, you know, overwhelmingly popular. You know, we prosecuted people who violated them in Geneva, in Nuremberg, in places like this. And so we have many examples of where there are technologies that are capable of doing that we choose not to. And I think still in the domain of war, take just the race, the arms race with the Soviet Union about nuclear missiles. Right? When we got our heads together in the 19 sixties, 19 seventies, especially after the Cuban Missile Crisis, it wasn't that we're going to go all out. There was incredible caution. The idea of, like, this is dangerous. Things are escalatory. Right? We should try to limit these in some way. We started arms negotiations treaties in the seventies that lasted through the 19 nineties. You know, because to acknowledge we're in an arms race is a deeply pessimistic approach. There is no arms race in history that's worked out well for us. The Germans versus the British and the naval naval, you know, fights, the missile gap in The US. These are things that are enormously expensive and incredibly risky to the nations that pursue them. And to recognize you're in an arms race is almost to insist you try to get out of that spiral in some way. re things that are enormously expensive and incredibly risky to the nations that pursue them. And to recognize you're in an arms race is almost to insist you try to get out of that spiral in some way. And I think the other thing more broadly outside of war is, you know, people will often say this about AI, like, it's coming. You have to accept it. We regulate and change technologies all the time. In the 19 seventies, you know, at Silomar, we have a big conference where the question of recombinant DNA was on the agenda. We could do it. Many scientists were deeply fearful of how that would work. The scientific community agreed to basically stop it in its tracks. Germline editing, the same thing. Imagine what advantage would come to the military if you could, you know, change the germline and create some kind of, you know, super soldiers out there. We've known how to do that for 50 years. So time scientists chose not to do that. Cloning. Yeah. We've been we know how to do cloning for decades now. Right? But the scientific community, with 1 rogue Chinese exception, right, has agreed not to do that. And so I do think there is a world where we should not just accept the future as being determined. We shape it actively. And maybe you want this thing to go forward. Maybe you don't. But we have many examples of genius being stuffed back into the bottle. And, you know, I think it's entirely possible. It may not be the thing we want to do, but it is something that's doable. And we shouldn't just resign ourselves to say, hey, our fate is out of our hands. We control it. And in fact, that might be the most dangerous view I hear in AI, where people say, it's just coming like a freight train. Nothing you can do about it. You just have to like figure out how you're going to adjust. I don't accept that. We can shape it. We can form it. We can allow it to do certain things, not other things. We don't have to accept that robots are fighting with no oversight in wars, or that robots are taking our jobs. These are things we may permit or may not permit. But it is our choice. And we should just like debate them on the merits rather than having being fatalistic about it. I think there is 1 aspect to sort of the x risk…

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