JSM 🏗️

Not just taxi drivers! EMTs, surgeons, and morticians are also at risk.

So have any tankers crossed through the strait?

@deanwball So even if we are not worried about Anthropic or OpenAI creating an out of control superintelligence and we should be worried about the government, their policy proposal seems still to address a lot of this. not saying I agree with them, but it seems like the status quo is bad!

@deanwball Yes, but what I mean is that the status quo is already very likely to be "the president takes over AI when there are military implications" leading to an arms race. Pause AI is suggesting an intl treaty to constrain govts, not just companies.

Pause AI rhetoric is predicated on the notion that the AI companies are recklessly racing toward dangerous tech and that a government controlled pause button is therefore necessary, but this seems really hard to reconcile with the fact that government is attempting to destroy an AI company because *the government* is racing toward plausibly dangerous AI uses (Sec. Hegseth has stated in official directives that he wants to deploy AI into critical systems regardless of whether it is aligned, for example) and *the company* is pushing back. The roles are totally reversed from the logic that Pause AI and frankly other AI safety advocates confidently assumed for years. It is *industry* that is in favor of alignment and at least somewhat measured deployment risks, and government whose actions seem much closer to reckless. I predicted this for years. I said, in particular, that pauses and bans and licensing regimes gave government a dangerously high degree of control over AI, and that the incentives of government are much more dangerous than those of private industry with competitive market incentives. I believe the events of the last month are good evidence in favor of my view. At this point if you are an AI safety advocate whose policy proposals do not wrestle seriously with the brutal political economic reality of the state and AI, I don’t take you seriously. It gives me no pleasure to have been right about this, by the way. The state has an incredibly strong structural incentive to centralize power using AI, and we are, all of us, not so empowered to stop it. I am quite concerned about this.

@deanwball Like maybe the specific "International Agreement to Pause" isn't perfect, but there's no world in which the US government doesn't have input. Today by default it will just be the President unilaterally deciding for everyone. Congress needs to provide some framework ASAP

@deanwball This is a reasonable critique. But imagine Anthropic, OpenAI and DeepSeek agree to share alignment knowledge because they are concerned; if there's no change from current policy, the US govenment would prosecute them under antitrust law, Logan Act violations, etc.

Old, tired, cooked, chopped: We feel bad about Native Americans, so give them exemptions from all gambling laws New, goated, hype, locked in: We feel bad about Native Americans, so give them exemptions from all zoning and housing laws

A hypothetical: 1. In the 2028 election, a Democrat has won. Say that it is Kamala Harris. 2. Using frontier AI systems contracted by the Department of Homeland Security, President Harris orders the creation of a new program for AI to monitor social media and notify the social media platform about posts spreading “misinformation” that “harms homeland and national security by spreading dangerous falsehoods.” 3. Many Republicans see this “misinformation” as core policy positions of their political party. 4. The AI-generated monitoring and notification system described in (2) is designed to conform to the pattern of jawboning exhibited by the Biden Administration in Murthy v. Missouri, where the Supreme Court ruled that people whose social media posts were taken down due to government pressure have no standing to sue. 5. The social media platforms create AI agents that receive the government’s AI generated requests and make decisions in seconds about whether to take down posts, deboost them, deplatform the user, etc. 6. According to very recent Supreme Court precedents, everything I have described falls into “lawful use” of an AI system by all parties involved. A person whose speech was deleted by a social media platform at the request of government does not have standing to sue the government, so long as the government did not threaten policy retaliation against the social media company. And a social media company’s content moderation policies are protected expression. Thus a person whose speech rights were harmed in this context currently has no legal recourse. 7. This is “America’s national security agencies using AI within the bounds of all lawful use.” It is also a wholly automated censorship regime. This is barely a hypothetical. Much of it already happened *under the Biden admin.* The only difference is the use of AI. In the world where this happens, I’d be curious to know whether thoughtful people like @Indian_Bronson would object. If xAI were one of the companies used by the government for the social media monitoring, would you encourage the company to cancel their business with the government? Or would you say they have an obligation to provide their services to the national security apparatus of USG for all lawful use? If you would encourage xAI to cancel their contract with the government, on what principle (not qualitative judgment—universal and timeless principle!) would you distinguish between the DoW’s current insistence on “all lawful use regardless of a private party’s qualms” and xAI’s hypothetical future insistence on “all lawful use regardless of a private party’s qualms”?

My ancestors buried half their children. All mine are alive. My ancestors' house had a dirt floor. Mine is wood. I have indoor plumbing, I have hot water, I have never in my life hauled a full bucket half a mile and I probably never will. Do you know how rare it is, in human history, for small children to wear shoes? Mine have multiple pairs. I can speak to my relatives who live thousands of miles away, for free, at any time. Video, if we want video. With machine translation, if we speak different languages. The original Library of Congress had 740 books in it. I have more than that. If I run out of books in my home my local public library has 350,000. If I want to take a hundred books with me on vacation, they all fit on a device that fits in my purse. I have heat in the winter and AC in the summer and a washing machine and I have never, ever, ever had to scrub a dress clean by hand in the stream. I can look up recipes from more than a hundred different countries and I've tried dozens of them. I ride a clean and modern train across my city for $4, or take a robot taxi if I'm out too late for the train. I donate $40,000 every year to the cause of getting healthcare to the world's poorest people and even after the donations I never have to think about whether I can afford a book, or a pair of shoes, or a cup of coffee. There is a great deal more to fight for, of course. I hope that our descendants will look back on our lives and list a thousand ways they're richer. Maybe we ourselves will do that, if some of the crazier stuff comes true. But the abundance is all around you and to a significant degree you aren't feeling it only because fish don't notice water.

@hamandcheese It's also not very charitable to call someone literally quoting your direct position that you still claim is pretty close to your beliefs as having hyper moralizing autism. Come on.

@hamandcheese It seems pretty reasonable to say that even "open borders with anglosphere countries" is much closer to "turbo free trade open borders guy" than current policy. Also reasonable to look at your 2017 tweets and miss that you had caveats to open borders.

The deeper issue with Joey is that he has the "hyper-moralizing, irony-blind" kind of autism while I have the "high decoupler, comfortable with cognitive dissonance" kind of ADHD, so we mostly talk past each other. Sad! I often enjoy his charts.

2 things can be true: 1. We should enact policy to prepare for risky scenarios even if those scenarios are unlikely (e.g. national security, AI unemployment, biorisk) 2. That guy doesn't understand what Uber and DoorDash's moat is. It's not "no one can code a delivery app"

@deanwball But if you have specific proposals or bills I can call my representative about, I would love to do that!

@deanwball The overlap of "people concerned about serious AI take-off and its impacts on human control of the economy/world" and "people who understand market economics" was basically only the broader rationalist/EA movement until a couple years ago. Now it's getting more interest.

“This Citrini scenario is ridiculous! It doesn’t contemplate the obvious fiscal policy response we would muster!” “Do you think we should discuss novel fiscal policy responses to AI labor issues, then, so we aren’t wholly winging it in the future if the scenario is anything like true?” “No. That would be ridiculous and a waste of time.” “So then your model of the world is that a serious and systemic negative labor market impact from AI is functionally impossible?” “It’s extremely unlikely.” “Ok, so granting that any specific future scenario we can imagine today is unlikely, do you think it’s worth preparing for an eventuality where AI has a negative, serious, and systemic labor market impact?” In a loop, until the scenario skeptic eventually hurls a pejorative about how you don’t understand any economics and are therefore an idiot.

This entire opinion is chock-full of the Major Questions Doctrine, and Gorsuch is out here doing work. Everyone pissed about Chevron being overturned but fine w/ tariffs being struck down has lost the plot. Chevron overturned *means* Trump doesn't just get a free pass.

Insane

@NathanpmYoung Is there a specific policy that we could point to though? I feel like you're articulating a policy idea from 5-10 years ago. Has no one really written a white paper on how this could be implemented?

I would like very little AI regulation except for if it seems likely that AI will kill us all soon in which case I would like massive regulation. I don't know how to do this, but I worry we might either get a crushing slow down of AI (bad) or no regulation at all (bad).

@EricBoehm87 FYI this chart divergence is April 2024, not April 2025

Did something happen in early April that wildly disrupted the US job market? 🤔🤔🤔

@hamandcheese I mean are there any actual bills in Congress that would address this? Trump doesn't have the same hold on the party that he did 2 months ago. Calling your rep and saying "hey there's this AI national security bill" could easily work, but I don't know what bill to point them at.

Unfortunately it looks increasingly likely that the enduring legacy of the Koch orbit libertarian movement will not be EPA dereg, CON law reform, or a wider appreciation for the role of commercial exchange in instilling cultural virtue and humaneness, but rather the unrestricted proliferation of vastly superhuman forms of machine intelligence as enabled by their dullard ideological progeny who, across several generations of astroturfed indoctrination, mode collapsed into low dimensional caricatures of otherwise brilliant classical liberal thinkers.

...there are people who actually want to hear what Robert Reich has to say? ...what?