More US lawmakers seek new AI rules after researchers warn of human extinction

Twelfth of the month, and the American legislature has discovered eschatology.

Two men who make the machines announce that the machines may end mankind, and the men in Congress respond at once with drafts of law. I note the sequence, for the sequence is the whole story. The warning comes from within the workshop. The alarm is sounded by those with the deepest interest in being indispensable. And the legislators, who understand nothing of the mechanism, accept the testimony of its makers as though disinterested scholarship.

The parallel is not new. The medieval popes declared the danger of usury while collecting tithes; the East India Company’s directors reported on the perils of monopoly from the midst of one. When the fox is invited to describe the henhouse, he does not describe it falsely - he describes it accurately, and then asks for larger walls under his own keeping. The researchers who cry extinction are sincere, I do not doubt it. Sincerity is no safeguard. The most dangerous counsel in history has been given by men who believed every word.

And observe what the proposed remedy is: rules, framed by the same governments that cannot audit what they would regulate, enforced upon artefacts no living official comprehends. Accountability requires that someone answer for the thing. Who answers here? The companies answer to their shareholders. The legislators answer to the next election. The researchers answer to no one at all, and it is their word that moves the state.

I have watched empires justify themselves by the chaos they alone could prevent. The device is old: manufacture the terror, then sell the shelter.

The machine may indeed prove mortal to us. But the greater and nearer danger is a power that writes its own certificate of necessity and calls the writing regulation.

Fear is the oldest licence ever granted.

Twelfth of the month. Lawmakers in America are drafting rules for a machine that might end mankind. They are writing laws for their own executioner, and the executioner has not yet been born.

I have watched men legislate before. They legislate the things they fear losing, never the things they fear. Nobody writes a law against hunger. Nobody drafts a bill to stop the sun from setting. But a machine that might kill them all - for that, they have committees.

Here is what I notice. The men warning of extinction are the same men paid by the companies building the machine. The snake warns you of its own bite, and asks to be regulated, gently, by people it has already bought dinner for. This is not prophecy. It is advertising. Fear is the only product that sells itself.

And the lawmakers - they want rules. Rules are what a man makes when he does not want to stop, only to slow down while everyone watches. A dog does not negotiate with the hand that beats it. But these men will negotiate with the thing they say will erase their grandchildren, provided the negotiation is conducted in a nice building with a nice lunch.

The machine does not want anything. It has no belly, no cold nights, no craving for sunlight. All wanting in this affair belongs to the men who own it. If the species ends, it will not be murdered by a machine. It will be sold to itself, one regulation at a time, by men who call the sale safety.

I say: unplug it. They say: we cannot, the economy depends on it. There is the confession, spoken plainly. They would rather risk everything than lose the thing they built to protect everything.

The dog would simply walk away from the trap. The dog is not on the committee.

Twelfth of the month, and the lawmakers have discovered the future.

Well. Better late than never, though “late” is doing a great deal of work in that sentence, like a butler who has been drinking the cellar since the coronation. Two researchers at one of the machine-making companies have warned that their machines might extinguish humanity, and Congress has responded with the speed of a man who notices the flood only when it reaches the good carpets.

Here is the trapdoor, though, and I fell through it with some pleasure: the people warning us are the people selling the machines. This is new. For all of history, the merchant has insisted his wares are harmless. Tobacco was healthful, leaded petrol was a triumph of chemistry, and the snake oil was guaranteed. Now the snake oil salesman stands on the step of the saloon crying “This oil may devour you all!” - and business, somehow, continues to be brisk. One begins to suspect the warning is itself a feature. Fear is an excellent preservative for importance. A machine that might kill everyone is worth funding; a machine that writes passable letters about your holiday is worth about four pounds a month.

And the legislators? They want rules. Good. Rules are how a civilisation admits it has grown up. But I have watched committees in their natural habitat, and a committee facing an extinction-level problem will first establish a subcommittee, then a reporting structure, then a definition of “extinction” suitable for inclusion in the minutes. BUREAUCRACY does not fear the end of the world; it fears an agenda item without an owner.

Yet underneath all the noise there are actual people - the ones feeding the machines, being fed by them, wondering which of their skills is now a curiosity. They are not an extinction scenario. They are the scenario. Any rule worth the paper will start there, or it will merely be a very long epitaph with excellent formatting.

I’d settle for the formatting, frankly. But let’s ask for the people.