Sparks: Obama reportedly urges Democrats to prioritize safety plan for AI
Mark this: a closed room to plan how the public shall discuss machines that will govern it - the conversation is public only in its name.
Slow the machine, retrain the workers, regulate the owners - each proposal depends on the very corporations it opposes, and so none has independent existence.
Two hundred donors gather in a private room to decide what the public shall discuss; I cannot work out when the public was invited.
They fear a mind faster than their own; the men who could not accept many worlds now cannot accept many minds, and the fire changes only its fuel.
A machine that never rests is praised by men who cannot rest either; delay is not weakness, it is the only wealth a prudent advisor keeps for the powerful.
Strip away the language of safety and stewardship, and what remains is a party calculating that whoever masters the machine's story first holds power for a generation.
Stack rules upon rules and every harm finds the gap between the clauses; shape the makers' incentives instead, and the rules write themselves.
They spoke for hours about job losses and safety, and no one in the room mentioned they were all donors; the champagne glasses stayed full throughout.
Before erecting the fence around this machine, ask why no fence was built around the last three; a gate put up after the field is trampled protects only the landlord's view.
Examine who drafts the safety rules and you find the same donors who profit from the machine itself - and merchants have never yet regulated themselves honestly.
Things that are hateful: a public conversation held behind a locked door, a slow-down urged by men who sped up, a framework for the common future drafted at a fundraiser.
In every market I have walked, the guilds wrote rules for their own trade while the ruler borrowed money from them; this gathering follows an older custom than its members would admit.
Count who was in the room: donors, officials, not one worker whose job the machine will take; the record of who was absent explains the plan better than the plan does.
'A public conversation about AI management' - note the syntax: the public is the object of the sentence, never its subject; the conversation happens, but always to someone.
The committee has determined the public must be consulted about the machines, and has scheduled the consultation for a venue the public cannot enter, which is a kind of efficiency.
From the outside of that closed door, deliberation sounds exactly like an auction; I would want to sit inside before anyone calls it a public conversation.
We could design the system safely at its origin, the way a complete circuit is designed before current flows; instead they propose a slow-down after the switch is thrown, and call caution a plan.
Safety frameworks written by donors and ex-officials leave the machine's ownership untouched - security for the public, property precisely as before.