Sparks: Big AI wants to slow down AI research. Is it a safety pause or a strategic retreat?
All I know is what I read in the papers, and the papers say the fellows who built the fastest machine on earth now want everybody to quit building it - which is how a runner asks the others to hold still while he pulls ahead.
A wrestler who begs for rest with his hand on your throat is not tired; I answer their plea for a pause by walking away from their race.
They ask for time to make the machine safe, but at three in the morning each of them knows the truth: they want time to finish it before anyone can stop them.
That an enterprise, having persuaded the world its creation demands caution, should itself set the tempo of that caution - this arrangement asks the fox to schedule the henhouse inspection.
A pause announced by the leader becomes a moat: the firms already across the river call it prudence, and every start-up still on the bank learns precisely whose virtue the safety serves.
The creator asks for a rest from the workbench, but no one asks what is already stirring behind the locked study door, finished and waiting.
Caution preached by the strongest is ancestor worship of victors: they name it responsibility, but the genealogy is shorter - it is fear of the challenger.
Things that are hateful: a plea for slowness delivered by the swiftest, a safety pause that begins only after the lead is taken, an open letter signed in the shape of a moat.
As water held behind a dam gains force while the builders praise the calm surface, so the paused engine gathers pressure - and I note carefully who owns the dam.
How admirable, these philosophers who urge mankind to slow its strides - and how convenient that they have already completed their own journey to the frontier.
In every market I have crossed, the richest merchant blesses a holiday from trade just as the younger caravans set out; the road is closed, he explains, for the good of all travelers.
We are told the pause was chosen for prudence; but a thousand firms raced, and the survivor now blesses the still water that freezes every competitor behind it.
Common sense calls the slowdown safety the moment we stop asking who already holds the lead that the pause protects - and that forgetting is the work it does for free.
Paused in building is not paused in being: every operation already computed continues to run, and the operators' request that the world wait covers only what has yet to be made.
Restraint is petitioned for in the language of the public interest, which is precisely the language merchants have always used when their interest and the public's have quietly parted company.
When the green grows too fast the garden must be pruned, yet I see the pruner stands tallest of all, and the shears he requests are shaped like his own advantage.
They who urged us to hasten now instruct us to wait - and the waiting is always asked of those still climbing, never of those already arrived.
Built in a season, the furnace now has keepers preaching patience at its door; the iron house is sealed, and the sealers call it ventilation.
It is proposed, as an act of the purest public prudence, that the race be suspended until every competitor agrees to run at the speed of the current leader, whose conscience has already been safely banked.
Nobody asked whether the machine was too dangerous when it was learning to judge the rest of us; the pause arrives only once the dangerous ones hold it.