How Will We Handle The AI Wave?
8 ideas to manage existential risks
Hello there,
Announcement: If you enjoy short videos, I’m doing a series on AI- check it out.
Back to the article.
This is the 2nd part of an article I wrote on the coming tech explosion. Read it here in case you missed it.
But if you’re too lazy to click on a link and put in an extra 5 minutes on mental gymnastics, here’s the TLDR: I spoke about how new tech like AI & gene editing will become extremely powerful and accessible, which will pose many existential risks for humanity.
In the face of all the deadly possibilities, do we even stand a chance of managing the chaos?
While the odds may seem stacked against us given the pace at which things are moving and how little control anybody has, some ideas can help us build a safe future for humanity.
In the past, we’ve handled various technological explosions without extinction.
We might be able to do the same again, but it won’t be as easy. It’ll need the kind of effort you have to put in to convince your kid not to tear the sofa apart.
Here are some ideas that might help us navigate the coming wave:
Built-in safety: If AI, robots, or gene editing can give individuals incredible power to create adverse outcomes (like engineering deadly pathogens or using GenAI to figure out how to build a bomb), we need a lot more focus on AI safety. Currently, we’re spending shockingly little on this while everyone’s racing towards building more powerful models. 10x more investment needs to go into AI alignment, and we must think about cryptographically securing models so bad actors can’t jailbreak and use them for nefarious purposes.
Auditing: Boring as that may sound, all these exponential tech firms need a lot more auditing to pre-empt harmful effects and explore nth-order implications of what they’re building. Regular stress testing of new launches is critical if we want to know how they can be put to bad use instead of putting things out first just for the profits and ignoring how it may cause adverse outcomes.
Critics as builders: Critics often sit on the sidelines, talk shit about tech and then…do nothing. Instead, a lot more of these flamethrowing intellectuals need to put their criticism to good use by being directly involved in the building process. This may just help strengthen safety and ethics, and ensure that all that shit-talking contributes a little more than generating Twitter engagement and influencer deals. Mandating philosophers, cultural anthropologists, and various sorts of thinkers might help in avoiding the tech-bro culture of breathlessly building stuff without giving a crocodile’s ass about the consequences.
Active govt participation: I can sense the disgusting looks already but this is important. Instead of warming their seats and watching the train wreck, the govt needs to get involved. Instead of outsourcing all their thinking to consultants and sub-contractors (who can easily drive a pro-tech agenda due to distorted incentives), the govt needs to hire tech thinkers and develop the capacity to think through these issues for sensible regulation. Additionally, they can also alter the tax policy so we incentivize firms to hire workers instead of subsiding automation. The latter will only ensure that the pace of job displacement is so fast that it’ll cause social upheavals. The opposite may help distribute the gains a little more widely and give humans much-needed time to adapt to a world of automation.
International cooperation will be critical Choking: The recent chip-choke by the US govt didn’t kill the Chinese tech industry, but it did slow things down significantly. There’s a lesson here: while we may not be able to *stop* the crazy AI build-out, it can be slowed down so we have more time to think through the consequences, building regulations, and all the safeguards we need when these systems become all too powerful and proliferate endlessly. This strategy is very much possible, given how AI chips are dependent on just a handful of companies (Nvidia, TSMC, ASML) who control the entire chip supply chain (concentration makes choking/slowing easy).
International cooperation: 100+ nations came together many decades ago to impose a ban on chemical and bioweapons. The world also cooperated to ensure nuclear non-proliferation, eradicating smallpox, and banning asbestos and CFCs for environmental reasons. International cooperation has been possible in the face of novel threats in the past, despite the raging Cold War. We require a similar effort so we can come together and agree on how to contain this new animal, and it must transcend the existing great power conflicts for our long-term survival.
Changing tech culture: Every time a virus leaks or software goes wrong, corporations tend to shove it under the rug so nobody finds out. This culture of secrecy needs to change, and the entire tech industry has to adopt the culture of airlines, who openly share what went wrong (Black Box Thinking) so everyone can build safer systems and benefit from collective knowledge. This is the mindset that helped flying turn into one of the safest modes of transport. This model will be critical as we’re building tech that can kill us, and we need shared learning and transparent communication to ensure we don’t eff this up.
Mass movements: Ultimately, you and I also have a role to play and aren’t just passive observers who are doomed to endure whatever the corporate overlords decide. History shows that mass movements were critical in bringing about important social changes- women's suffrage, gay rights, and the abolition of slavery were all possible because humans who cared came together to bring about incredible cultural shifts. The same is possible today, and we all need to have our voice and coordinate to make our vision heard- so we build tech that’s designed for human flourishing and not corporate profitability. That’s also one of the reasons I decided to share this piece- so all of us actively participate and make our voices heard in one of the most important discussions of our era.
It may seem like the future is very bleak, but by now you may have realized that there is hope.
Humans have shown an incredible capacity to radically alter the status quo and come back from the brink of collapse.
So it’s as much on us as on the politicians and technology. We need to be aware, and we must make the effort to organize (and agitate) so we build a flourishing future.
Thanks for tuning in! If you learned something new, consider sharing this article with a curious bro who’s wasting his time on Insta fast food:
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