Discussing EA in global south contexts
Getting started in AI governance
I see way too many people confusing movement with progress in the policy space.
There can be a lot of drafts becoming bills with still significant room for regulatory capture in the specifics, which will be decided later on. Take risk levels, for instance, which are subjective - lots of legal leeway for companies to exploit.
Communicating by keeping human rights at the centre of AI Policy discussion is extremely underappreciated.
For e.g., the UN Human Rights chief in 2021 called for a moratorium on the sale and use of artificial intelligence (AI) systems until adequate safeguards are put in place.
Respect for human rights is a well-established central norm; leverage it
Great post!
Do note that given the context and background, a lot of your peers are probably going to be nudged towards charitable ideas. I would want to be generally mindful that you are doing things that have counterfactual impacts while also taking into account the value of your own time and potential to do good.
I encourage you to also be cognizant of not epistemically taking over other people's world models with something like "AI is going to kill us all" - I think an uncomfortable amount of space inadvertently and unknowingly does this and is one of the key reasons why I never started an EA group at my university.
Also, here is a link if anyone wants to read more on the China AI registry which seems to be based on the model cards paper
Nice summarization! I generally see model registries as a good tool to ensure deployment safety by logging versions of algorithms and tracking spikes in capabilities. I think a feasible way to push this into the current discourse is by setting it in the current algorithmic transparency agenda.
Potential risks here include who decides what is a new version of a given model. If the nomenclature is left in the hands of companies, it is prone to be misused. Also, the EU AI Act seems to take a risk-based approach, with the different kinds of risks being more or less lines in the sand.
Another important point is what we do with the information we gather from these sources - I think there are "softer"(safety assessments, incident reporting) and "harder"(bans, disabling) ways to go about this. It seems likely to me that governments are going to want to lean into the softer bucket to enable innovation and have some due process kick in. This is probably more true with the US which has always favoured sector-specific regulation.
After talking and working for some time with non-EA organisations in the AI Policy space, I believe that we need to give more credence to the here-and-now of AI safety policy as well to get the attention of policymakers and get our foot in the door. That also gives us space to collaborate with other think tanks and organisations outside of the x-risk space that are proactive and committed to AI policy. Right now, a lot of those people also see X-risks as being fringe and radical(and these are people who are supposed to be on our side).
Governments tend to move slowly, with due process, and in small increments(think, "We are going to first maybe do some risk monitoring, only then auditing"). Policymakers are only visionaries with horizons until the end of their terms(hmm, no surprise). Usually, broad strokes in policy require precedents of a similar size for it to be feasible within a policymakers' agenda and the Overton window.
Every group that comes to a policy meeting thinks that their agenda item is the most pressing because, by definition, most of the time, contacting and getting meetings with policymakers means that you are proactive and have done your homework.
I want to see more EAs respond to Public Voice Opportunities, for instance- something I rarely hear on the EA forum or via EA channels/material.
So, some high-level suggestions based on my interactions with other people I have are:
I find the Biden chip export controls a step in the right direction, and it also made me update my world model of compute governance being an impactful lever. However, I am concerned that our goals aren't aligned with theirs; US policymakers' incentive right now is to curb China's tech growth and fun trade war reasons, not pause AI.
This optimization for different incentives is probably going to create some split between US policymakers and AI safety folks as time goes on.
It also makes China more likely to treat this as a tech race which sets up interesting competitive race dynamics between the US and China which I don't see talked about enough.
I don't think we have a good answer to what happens after we do auditing of an AI model and find something wrong.
Given that our current understanding of AI's internal workings is at least a generation behind, it's not exactly like we can isolate what mechanism is causing certain behaviours. (Would really appreciate any input here- I see very little to no discussion on this in governance papers; it's almost as if policy folks are oblivious to the technical hurdles which await working groups)