[int_19h]

How exactly do you envision the enforcement? Only sell GPUs to people with a "certified ethical AI researcher" license? Purge torch, transformers etc from PyPI and only provide controlled access to them? Remove all the books and papers on the building blocks from public libraries and online?

[DonHopkins]

We could create an all-powerful world-encompassing AI called AligNet that would monitor all human communication and control space lasers and autonomous drones to destroy the facilities and murder the families of anyone researching AI who isn't a "certified ethical AI researcher".

[drdeca]

I think you are talking about enforcing different things? The thing to enforce, which the parent commenter described, seemed to be a 20% tax on AI profits of “big AI companies”, to be paid to AI safety research groups.

That doesn’t sound unenforceable to me. That’s just like, a tax on a kind of business.

[int_19h]

The end goal of giving money to AI safety research groups is presumably to come up with some definition of "safe AI" that will then have to be actually enforced. Otherwise it's just a sinecure.

[drdeca]

If the safety groups figure out how to do things in a way which we can be confident is safe, this would make it at least possible for the capabilities researchers to do things in those ways. I would imagine people would prefer to do things in safe ways all else being equal. So, if the safety researchers find safety methods which have small enough capabilities costs, then presumably the people who should use those methods, would tend to do so?

[int_19h]

That does nothing for the intentionally malicious actors.

[drdeca]

Bad humans taking over the world is still better than some inhuman alien optimization process taking over the world.

[int_19h]

It's not an either-or. Malicious actors will disregard the guardrails to achieve their objectives, but in the process, they will create that very "inhuman alien optimization process" and give it the keys.