EA - 12 tentative ideas for US AI policy (Luke Muehlhauser) by Lizka

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: 12 tentative ideas for US AI policy (Luke Muehlhauser), published by Lizka on April 19, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Luke Muehlhauser recently posted this list of ideas. See also this List of lists of government AI policy ideas and How major governments can help with the most important century.The full text of the post is below.About two years ago, I wrote that “it’s difficult to know which ‘intermediate goals’ [e.g. policy goals] we could pursue that, if achieved, would clearly increase the odds of eventual good outcomes from transformative AI.” Much has changed since then, and in this post I give an update on 12 ideas for US policy goals that I tentatively think would increase the odds of good outcomes from transformative AI.I think the US generally over-regulates, and that most people underrate the enormous benefits of rapid innovation. However, when 50% of the experts on a specific technology think there is a reasonable chance it will result in outcomes that are “extremely bad (e.g. human extinction),” I think ambitious and thoughtful regulation is warranted.First, some caveats:These are my own tentative opinions, not Open Philanthropy’s. I might easily change my opinions in response to further analysis or further developments.My opinions are premised on a strategic picture similar to the one outlined in my colleague Holden Karnofsky’s Most Important Century and Implications of. posts. In other words, I think transformative AI could bring enormous benefits, but I also take full-blown existential risk from transformative AI as a plausible and urgent concern, and I am more agnostic about this risk’s likelihood, shape, and tractability than e.g. a recent TIME op-ed.None of the policy options below have gotten sufficient scrutiny (though they have received far more scrutiny than is presented here), and there are many ways their impact could turn out — upon further analysis or upon implementation — to be net-negative, even if my basic picture of the strategic situation is right.To my knowledge, none of these policy ideas have been worked out in enough detail to allow for immediate implementation, but experts have begun to draft the potential details for most of them (not included here). None of these ideas are original to me.This post doesn’t explain much of my reasoning for tentatively favoring these policy options. All the options below have complicated mixtures of pros and cons, and many experts oppose (or support) each one. This post isn’t intended to (and shouldn’t) convince anyone. However, in the wake of recent AI advances and discussion, many people have been asking me for these kinds of policy ideas, so I am sharing my opinions here.Some of these policy options are more politically tractable than others, but, as I think we’ve seen recently, the political landscape sometimes shifts rapidly and unexpectedly.Those caveats in hand, below are some of my current personal guesses about US policy options that would reduce existential risk from AI in expectation (in no order).Software export controls. Control the export (to anyone) of “frontier AI models,” i.e. models with highly general capabilities over some threshold, or (more simply) models trained with a compute budget over some threshold (e.g. as much compute as $1 billion can buy today). This will help limit the proliferation of the models which probably pose the greatest risk. Also restrict API access in some ways, as API access can potentially be used to generate an optimized dataset sufficient to train a smaller model to reach performance similar to that of the larger model.Require hardware security features on cutting-edge chips. Security features on chips can be leveraged for many useful compute governance purposes, e.g. to verify compliance with export controls and domestic regulatio...