EA - Current UK government levers on AI development by rosehadshar

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: Current UK government levers on AI development, published by rosehadshar on April 10, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.This is a link post for this collection of current UK government levers on AI development.At the end of 2022, I made a collection of information on current UK government levers on AI development, focused on levers which seem to me to have potentially significant implications for the governance of advanced AI.The primary audience I’m intending for the collection is people who work in or are considering working in AI governance and policy, and I hope it will be useful as an input into:Building more detailed models of how the UK government might affect AI development and deployment.Getting an overview of the policy status quo in the UK.Thinking about which policy areas are likely to matter more for managing transitions to advanced AI.Thinking about how important influencing the UK government is relative to other actors.In this post, I try to situate current UK government levers in the broader context, to give a sense of the limits of the collection.Some initial caveats:The collection is based exclusively on publicly available information, not on conversations with relevant government officials.I’m not an expert in the UK government or in AI policy.The factual information in the collection hasn’t been vetted by relevant experts. I expect there are things I’ve misunderstood, and important things that I’ve missed.The collection is a snapshot in time. To the best of my knowledge, the information is up to date as of April 2023, but the collection will soon get out of date. I am not going to personally commit to updating the collection, but would be excited for others to do so. If you’re interested, comment on this post or on the collection, or send me a message.I am not advocating that particular actors should try to pull any particular lever. I think it’s easy to do more harm than good, and encourage readers to orient to the collection as a way of thinking about how different trajectories might play out, rather than as a straightforward input into which policies to push. I think that figuring out net positive ways of influencing policy could be very valuable, but requires a bunch of work on top of the sorts of information in this collection.This collection is just a small part of the puzzle. Two aspects of this which I’ll unpack in a bit more detail below:The actions of the UK government might not matter.Even conditional on UK government actions mattering, there are many important things besides current policy levers.Will the actions of the UK government matter?I’m pretty uncertain about whether the actions of the UK government will end up mattering, but I do think it’s likely enough that the UK government is worth some attention.What needs to be true for the actions of the UK government to matter?Government(s) needs to matter.Governments tend to move slowly, so the faster takeoff is the less influence they'll have relatively, all else equal.I think there are fast-ish takeoff scenarios where governments still matter a lot, and slow takeoff scenarios which are plausible.So I feel pretty confident that this is likely enough to be worth serious attention.The UK needs to matter.I can see two main ways that the UK ends up mattering:DeepMind/Graphcore/Arm/some other UK-based entity ends up being a major player in the development of advanced AI.The UK influences other more important actors, for example via:UK government powers over AI companies outside of the UK.International agreements.Regulatory diffusion.Diplomacy.I’m not well-informed here, but again this seems likely enough to be worth some attention.The UK government needs to have relevant powers.The UK government currently has powers over information, including kinds o...