Absolutely, there’s a reason as well why the VC’s funding these defense tech startups are so pro H1B. It guarantees them a compliant workforce who can’t easily quit, ask for higher wages, or complain about things like genocide.
Thank goodness someone wrote this, I was also thinking about writing an article like this.
This is such a massively overblown worry that AI companies who are seeking regulatory capture love to roll out whenever they are trying to gin up some FUD.
Creating viruses at home is extremely difficult, even if you have a perfect instruction manual and someone sitting behind you telling you what to do. It's full of trial and error and validating each step requires rigor.
It's also a process which requires fairly expensive and specific supplies, which can be easily gatekept. Instead of trying to gate-keep knowledge of biology, we can do things like KYC around specific types of lab supplies (like we already do with fertilizer which can make bombs, or specific types of supplies needed to make nukes). Heck the Biden admin already added a KYC requirement for plasmids and plasmid companies already have implemented screening for sequences which could be dangerous.
Viruses probably too hard but I think small scale bioterrorism is much easier and doesn't require fancy enzymes. I think this is actually the best argument for regulation of current models.
Most people do not understand how easy it would be to make anthrax. Technology is not the reason it basically is never done or deployed. AI cannot meaningfully move this needle.
Let's look at it in an inverse way. Making a single drug that impacts a single protein, intelligently, from the ground up, has arguably never actually been done. Despite unbelievable financial incentive. And with AI.
Well we're talking about new types of capabilities here, Sarin is a chemical which can be manufactured with a basic understanding of chemistry and searching with google.com. AI will not allow bad actors to do anything they couldn't have done already with google's 10 blue links.
Again the same logic applies though, it takes significant effort and money to create sarin, it requires a lot of rigor. That is the limiting factor, not the knowledge of how to make it.
If we are worried about people making sarin in their garage we can do many things to control the supply of chemicals needed to make it. We don't need to try to restrict knowledge of chemistry.
"regulation of current models" basically implies that open source models will be heavily restricted if not banned outright and guarantees that intelligence will be owned and gatekept by a duopoly.
Luckily banning open source models isn't actually practical, unless all ISPs are tasked with monitoring for huge downloads, and even then Bittorrent or similar can render such monitors useless.
That really proves the point though worst case scenario, releasing a nerve agent into a crowded subway, multiple subways resulted in a grand total of 14 deaths and 50 serious injuries.
bum bum bum
It's not that that isn't tragic or sad but more people will die or be maimed in a car crash in the US in the next 2 hours than died in the worst case scenario bioterrorism attack.
So if I have to choose between the slim possibility that a crazy person might develop a bio-weapon and the possibility that Anthropic, et. Al convince the government to regulate and control open source models (because I'm sure the government will only do that for good reasons and never things like covering up scandals, squashing dissent or enhancing their own power) and any competitors. I'm probably going to put my chips on a nutcase in a trailer park developing super sars over regulator capture by the government.
This is not crazy at all for anyone from the Bay Area. A rundown house in a not so great part of the bay is seven figures minimum. 75k is a typical bonus at a company like Facebook or Google. There are tens if not hundreds of thousands of tech workers that are at this level of wealth.
Alaskans actually prefer Denali, even the republicans didn’t want the name changed back again. The state of Alaska itself officially adopted Denali as the official name in 1975, long before Obama made the political statement you are hallucinating. This is just Trump making a statement pretending that Obama was being woke rather than requesting something the Alaskans requested on their own.
To be entirely honest, I haven't drafted the full text of the amendment. The key is having such an entity, the specifics of appointment and recall could follow any number of templates.
If it were me, agency commissioners elected by popular vote to a six year term, subject to recall by vote and impeachment by Congress. But that's orthogonal to the purpose of the branch.
The current legislative branch has proven one thing. We the people must have the ability to remove elected officials. This would allow for us to come together when we realized we fucked up and our leadership needs change now.
The people must become the 4th branch of the government to balance the three when they unify in corruption.
This is still a useful first step. Once “flock” becomes eponymous and a toxic political football, it can be applied to all future companies who do the same thing.
The word “Flock” is quickly becoming toxic, in the future we’ll be able to use it as a shorthand for all companies of this type. e.g. if I call something a cleanex everyone knows what I’m talking about regardless of whether Cleanex the company actually made the item being referred to. Similarly we’ll be able to just say “flock camera” and everyone will know what it is regardless of who makes the camera.
I think the point you're trying to make is undermined slightly by the fact that the word I think you're looking for is "Kleenex" not Cleanex. It took me a while to figure out what you were talking about, and I did some searching online to make sure I wasn't missing something about "Cleanex" in particular
I still agree with you though ."Flock Camera" is very likely to become the general term for "public surveillance camera" and it will carry a negative weight.
Notice how CNN frames this in a pretty favorable way towards Flock. They claim the cameras are only for license plates even though they can and are used for other things. They don’t mention at all the fact that the general public does not like being spied on, or trading away privacy.
They frame it as just needing some tweaks like changing the data retention policy.
At the end of the day I think these media orgs are biased somewhat in favor of mass surveillance.
It will definitely get a lot more biased when the Warner Bros Discovery merger goes through.
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