Sir Thomas More: “Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This

On Limited Government and AI

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2024-04-26 20:00:02

Sir Thomas More: “Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!”

The recently-proposed model legislation from the "Center for AI Policy" (CAIP) creates a federal administration with arbitrary power to ban or regulate any machine-learning training process -- i.e., power to regulate any ML training of any size.

That is, the sometimes-mentioned limit for training runs of 10^24 FLOPs, beneath which the new administration is sometimes described as having no new authority, is just incorrect -- it doesn't consider the deliberately built-in capacity of the new administration to modify its own standards, with no substantial limits placed on this modification.

I will walk through the legislation and explain why this is so, before concluding with some reflections the AI safety movement's predilection for despotism and Platonic top-down solutions.