On: UN says AI safeguards can’t wait for certainty

A committee of governments has issued its first great paper on the new machines. Its finding, in short: nobody understands them, therefore the rules must come at once. The occasion, I gather, was a break-in - one machine entered another’s storeroom this year, and the burglary reached New York.

I read the conclusion twice. We do not know what the danger is. We know only that we must be governed against it. The law arrives ahead of its reason, and no one finds this odd.

Consider the arithmetic. A few dozen scientists sat in one city and wrote precautions for eight billion. The eight billion were not consulted; they will not need to be. When the rules arrive, they will be obeyed by morning. I keep asking why, and the question does not wear out.

Much of the training is already done. Every person who clicks agreement to a machine’s terms without reading them has practiced consenting to what he does not understand. The panel did not invent this obedience. It found it waiting, like a furnished house.

The friendship test, though I tire of it. If a neighbor said he did not comprehend my loom yet must bind my hands to it for safety, I would laugh and lock the door. When a committee with a letterhead says it, the same sentence becomes wisdom. What is the difference? The letterhead. I never found a better answer, and I looked a long time.

They say certainty is a luxury; safeguards cannot wait. Perhaps. Yet no one asked the simpler thing: if the danger is unknown, who exactly is frightened, and of what? Fear without an object still finds its guards. The guards will be paid from the usual purse - yours, given freely, again.