Hank Green's AI Blunder

Those who think we are living in the end times are less likely to say climate change is an extremely or very serious problem (51 percent) than those who do not believe this (62 percent).

Understanding this is a two-step process. First, we need to make sense of what’s behind this statement. The short answer concerns a cluster of ideologies that Dr. Timnit Gebru and I have called the “TESCREAL bundle.” The term is admittedly clunky, but the concept couldn’t be more important, because this bundle of overlapping movements and ideologies has become hugely influential among the tech elite.

TESCREALism — meaning the worldview that arises from this bundle — is simple enough: at its heart is a techno-utopian vision of the future in which we re-engineer humanity, colonize space, plunder the cosmos, and establish a sprawling intergalactic civilization full of trillions and trillions of “happy” people, nearly all of them “living” inside enormous computer simulations. In the process, all our problems will be solved, and eternal life will become a real possibility.

The uptick in lobbying work — and the policies CAIP and CAIS are pushing — could directly benefit top AI firms, said Suresh Venkatasubramanian, a professor at Brown University who co-authored a 2022 White House document that focused more on AI’s near-term risks, including its potential to undermine privacy or increase discrimination through biased screening tools.

The similarly named Center for AI Policy and Center for AI Safety both registered their first lobbyists in late 2023, raising the profile of a sprawling influence battle that’s so far been fought largely through think tanks and congressional fellowships.

Each nonprofit spent close to $100,000 on lobbying in the last three months of the year. The groups draw money from organizations with close ties to the AI industry like Open Philanthropy, financed by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, and Lightspeed Grants, backed by Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn.

Their message includes policies like CAIP’s call for legislation that would hold AI developers liable for “severe harms,” require permits to develop “high-risk” systems and empower regulators to “pause AI projects if they identify a clear emergency.”

“Why do the models give these attackers what they want 90% of the time but the rest of us have to deal with ass-kissing, stonewalling, and acid trips?”

1962, Kolko published his Triumph of Conservatism, which advanced the heretical claim that “business leaders, and not the reformers, inspired the era’s legislation regulating business.” In fact, Kolko argued, “regulatory movements were usually initiated by the dominant business to be regulated.”

Kolko, though, mocked the idea that Sinclair had “brought the packers to their knees.” In fact, he concluded that the biggest meatpackers “were warm friends of regulation” because only the biggest packers, not their smaller, less organized competitors, had the resources to comply with the new restrictions.

Regulation was a way of restraining competition and protecting market share. Kolko observed that Swift and its fellow industry giants celebrated passage of the Meat Inspection Act of 1906 with advertisements declaring: “It is a wise law. Its enforcement must be universal and uniform.”

In this first book and in a more focused study titled Railroads and Regulation, published in 1970, Kolko offered a sweeping indictment of what he believed to be a naïve, simplistic understanding of the relationship between government and business. Kolko argued that regulatory agencies overwhelmingly served the interests of big business, which adeptly used them to fix prices and restrain competition.

Railroads, for example, worked with the Interstate Commerce Commission to mute competition, ensuring higher profits via stable freight rates. For other industries, incumbent firms embraced regulation as a way of rewarding their capital investments in cutting-edge technology. For example, the condiments king Henry J. Heinz and brewer Frederick Pabst benefited greatly when Congress passed food purity laws that enshrined their methods of manufacturing as the new standard, leaving smaller rivals at a distinct disadvantage.

In 1971, Stigler published an article titled “The Theory of Economic Regulation” that provided a theoretical understanding for why regulation almost always ended up serving the interests of big business. This became known as the theory of regulatory capture, which held that large, incumbent firms typically used regulations to thwart competitors. The analysis went on to become one of the most-cited economics articles ever written, helping Stigler win the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 1982.

Not that you would know any of this from watching Congress lap up Sam Altman’s pleas for regulation of the blossoming AI industry. Instead, our senators swallowed the tech titan’s testimony with all the skepticism of a bunch of slack-jawed yokels listening to a carnival barker.

Researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky, who’s been warning about the risks of AI for more than a decade on podcasts and elsewhere, believes that lumping all of those concerns into one bucket is a bad idea. “You want different names for the project of ‘having AIs not kill everyone’ and ’have AIs used by banks make fair loans,” he said. “Broadening definitions is usually foolish, because it is usually wiser to think about different problems differently, and AI extinction risk and AI bias risk are different risks.”

Yudkowsky, an influential but controversial figure for his alarmist views on AI (he wrote in Time about the potential necessity of ordering airstrikes on AI data centers), isn’t alone in his views. Others in the AI industry worry that “safety” in AI, which has come to underpin guardrails that companies are implementing, may become politicized as it grows to include hot button social issues like bias and diversity.

Yudkowsky, an influential but controversial figure for his alarmist views on AI (he wrote in Time about the potential necessity of ordering airstrikes on AI data centers), isn’t alone in his views. Others in the AI industry worry that “safety” in AI, which has come to underpin guardrails that companies are implementing, may become politicized as it grows to include hot button social issues like bias and diversity. That could erode its meaning and power, even as it receives huge public and private investment, and unprecedented attention.

Moskovitz and the field of AI safety in general are tied to the Effective Altruism movement, which hopes to curb existential risks to humanity, such as runaway AI systems.The topic of AI safety is a hot button issue in the tech industry and has spawned a counter movement, called Effective Accelerationism, which believes that focusing on the risks of technology does more harm than good by hindering critical progress.

As the CSET study points out, Google and Microsoft are some of the biggest contributors to published papers on AI safety research.