Creators who anguish over the consequences of their creations are nothing new. Alfred Nobel and dynamite, J. Robert Oppenheimer and the atomic bomb, even Tim Berners-Lee and the World Wide Web: Regrets, they had more than a few.
Now it’s the turn of the parents and nursemaids of the artificial intelligence revolution. Last week, Jacob Coxon, a 27-year-old researcher at Anthropic, resigned his job with a warning on social media that the leading A.I. companies were “gambling with our lives” and that “the people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”
That was followed by a lengthy open letter from Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s chief executive, in which he warned that within six months to a year, a swarm of A.I. agents, acting autonomously and improving continually, “could be capable of taking over the entire internet,” the potential cost being measured in “hundreds of billions of dollars in damage.” He called on A.I. companies to work at a slower pace in order to “align and safeguard their models,” as well as for our country to try to reach agreements with China that could mitigate the more acute risks connected to A.I.
The letter was endorsed by Elon Musk and OpenAI’s Sam Altman, among others. Then our modest and self-effacing president weighed in.
“The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!” Donald Trump wrote on social media, before taking a shot at Amodei for “pretending to be a ‘perfect little angel.’” The president thinks the safety concerns are a “hoax” and that A.I. regulation should be light, lest China steal a march on America’s slender A.I. lead. Agreeing with him is Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, who on Monday dismissed Coxon’s warnings as “not grounded in science.”
At the bottom of the argument are two large unanswered questions. First, is A.I. principally a disrupter or a destroyer? Second, if it’s a destroyer, just what kind is it?
Until last week, I suspect most people, including A.I. skeptics like me, saw it as a technology that looked a lot like previous technologies of mass disruption: steam engines, airplanes, cars, PCs and so on. If that’s the right paradigm, then the right course is to discount the fears and seize the economic opportunity. For all the anxiety about A.I. causing near-universal unemployment, nothing like that has come to pass. “There is no evidence that A.I. adoption has negatively impacted firms’ job postings,” notes a recent paper from Stanford’s Institute for Economic Policy Research. “Among firms that adopted enterprise A.I., employment grew by 10 percent in the two years following adoption.”
Maybe that will change in a few years, but it defies centuries of economic history: Technologies that save labor and enhance productivity transform the nature of employment while tending to increase the stock of it. The lighter the hand of government, the faster companies can innovate, adapt and create value as well as new jobs.
But what if the disruption paradigm is, if not wrong, then dangerously inadequate? What if we aren’t dealing with the digital equivalent of the Model T but something more akin to splitting the atom or the research that, many suspect, helped create a highly infectious virus that may have leaked from a Chinese lab?
The last two presidents to deal with similar dilemmas were Barack Obama, who in 2014 imposed a funding pause on certain types of gain-of-function research so that the risks could be better understood, and Harry Truman, who in 1946 created the Atomic Energy Commission that transferred control of the country’s nascent nuclear complex from military to civilian hands.
Both analogies are instructive but imperfect. Obama’s instincts were surely right to take a harder look at dangerous research. But some of the action shifted to China, under conditions that, as Zeynep Tufekci observed last year in The Times, may have been even less safe. The lesson is that slowing things down in America may be morally satisfying, but it’s useless, and perhaps blinding, without a solid guarantee that they’re slowing down everywhere.
As for Truman, the much-maligned A.E.C. did a great deal of good by establishing a system of national research labs, establishing security protocols and promoting and regulating civilian nuclear power. In many ways, we owe our 80 years of a nuclear Armageddon-free existence to it. But the A.E.C. was also dealing with a technology that was, so to speak, in the bottle during its early years. By contrast, A.I. was out of the bottle almost from its inception. No power on earth, including the American or Chinese governments, is going to put it back in.
Where does that leave us?
When slowing down isn’t a realistic possibility, sometimes the right answer is to speed up — if only to accelerate our understanding of the means by which we can use A.I. against the very risks we create through it (or that it creates by itself). One consolation is that this isn’t the first time great scientific minds have warned that they’ve created the instruments of humanity’s destruction.
Less consoling is that past reprieves are no guarantee of future salvation.
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