Regulate what, exactly?
Limit what AI corporations can use? Other countries would love that more than anything. Basically a free gift to any competitors or any startup that quietly avoids the rules.
There’s a theoretical version where all the countries in the world join hands and agree not to compete with each other, but that’s so impractical that I don’t find it interesting to discuss.
> Place legal restrictions on (at least) large companies such that they may not use AI to replace human labor in this way.
So small companies get the advantage, but large companies don’t? And large companies in other countries also get the advantage?
This is a highly precise way for a country to take out all of their large companies. What would actually happen is that every large company would start the process of relocating to another country right away, accelerating job losses rather than slowing them.
"Competition" only makes sense within a pre-mediated set of constrains. Rules all competitors agree to.
Workable rules are a difficult problem, that doesn't mean it wasn't worthwhile to come up with them.
The rules would never work on a global economy.
If you think the entire world is going to shake hands and agree not to let their companies use a competitive advantage, that’s not a conversation I’m interested in having. It’s a fantasy.
If you think it’s that easy to get all competitors in a global economy to agree to a set of rules, maybe start with nuclear disarmament?
Getting people to agree isn't easy, that doesn't mean it wasn't worthwhile. There often even isn't any viable alternative to reaching an agreement in social settings.
When your hyper-competitive mode of thinking leads to undesirable consequences, you have to change your mindset. Reality doesn't conform to wishful thinking.
Almost nobody (I have to say almost) in the world including Xi, the ceo of deep seek, Dario, and even Sam Altman want AI to kill everyone. I really think we just have to
A. Get stakeholders to believe this is a bad idea.
B. show that we’re willing to do it first to prevent this stupid race from continuing.
The treaty came after the crisis, not before. And it only banned atmospheric, underwater, and space tests. The US and USSR kept testing underground on a large scale, while France and China never signed it and continued atmospheric tests for years.
An AI treaty could quite easily be offered by the US because it has multiple frontier labs. Most countries would quite happily limit the activity of their larger companies in exchange for their companies not being eaten alive by AI generally. It is pretty great fodder for international cooperation, and governments can move fast when it is timely to do so.
I am highly skeptical everyone will play by the rules, even if you could get people to agree on paper.
The difference between something like "unlicensed AI training" and, e.g, Nuclear weapon non-proliferation is that nukes are realistically only a deterrence against invasion. There are no economic benefits to having them in a stockpile. They're hard to make, and the manufacturing and testing steps are pretty obvious to an observer.
This is opposed to AI training in a data center that might host remote-stream video games, hospital infrastructure, protein folding, etc. How will we be able to police that in any realistic fashion? Will China or the US allow unfettered visibility into all data centers data streams to outsiders?
And again, the incentives: Imagine having Astra v3 or Opus 8 while everyone else is stuck with a lobotomized version of GPT 4o.
What about the military applications? The weapon of the future is autonomous drone swarms. If I'm a superpower, I'm pouring hundreds of billions into that.
About the only realistic way this is going to work is if we are able to solve alignment in a way that doesn't significantly hinder AI development. If it imposes even, say, a 20% handicap, people will ignore it.
"Alignment" likely is unsolvable programmatically: Conscious intelligence is more powerful than unconscious. How "aligned" are you? Would you want to be? What difference of any relevance is there between you and "artificial" conscious intelligence that allows you to turn them into slaves?
There is not a single country nor trading block on Earth who is going to allow some AI dominant superpower to ravage them. The idea that America or China wins an economic game here is absurd, what happens instead is that trade barriers go up hard and the world fragments into blocks that tolerate AI to differing levels. Unevenly distributed AGI kills globalism the next day.
For the rest of your reply you ignore the “at least” part in that sentence, and also seem to expect a detailed policy proposal. The details can be worked out; there is some reasonable compromise between what activities AI can and cannot be used for, and what level of capability can be deployed where.
More broadly, you seem to believe in a just world fallacy of unregulated capitalism being an inherent good. It isn’t, and regulations exist even in the United States, so this unregulated state doesn’t exist now.
Moreover, regulations and redistribution are stronger elsewhere in the developed world, and there is a strong argument to be made that the lack of these in the US, and the gap between rich and poor that it causes, is responsible for more suffering than having more of these things outside of it.
will have nukes.
Doesn't matter how much "intelligence" you have stockpiled when nukes start raining down on you.
We kinda do for other areas.
Largely the world agrees not to pirate software, tv, other IP.
THe issue of joblessness is well understood in china, they know that jobless people means a drop in living standards, a drop in living standards means the "contract" has failed.
So it makes sense that countries like america and the constituents of the EU understand that loosing 10% of all jobs in a few years is going to be a massive dick punch.
I also I think that finally the historians and economic types havae got through to the dipshit billionaire that they only have money because the plebs are spending money. If the plebs are unemployed and unemployable, they (the billionaires) are going to be lynched.
Hence the robot dogs
Sure - look at what is being done today with H1B visas and tariffs.
What is more important to you - having a job and a functioning economy/society, or upholding some "free market" doctrine you've bought into?
Just as with H1B visas, you restrict usage. For example, don't allow AI to replace any job that pays under $250K.
If foreign countries make things cheaper, just as China is making EVs that cost a fraction of a Tesla, then slap tariffs on them.
A government should be primarily concerned about the people it represents, not about the profitability of the companies who are lobbying/bribing it.
There will still be a market for "trust". And its customers will never trust the machines. And within that market a lot of new startups will emerge for those who actually get to work and seize opportunities rather than lament a bygone era.
In the short term yes, but in the long term no.
What makes AI different to previous technological shifts is that it is (or will be) a general purpose technology, equally capable of itself doing the new jobs that it creates (so yeah, they'll be created, but also immediately taken away).
The saving grace is that this won't happen immediately, or as soon as we get something the AI companies slap an "AGI" label on in a couple of years, and it will likely take decades until we have an "artificial human" tech that genuinely could do any job (if we choose to allow that future).
I have some bad news for you if you bought into the idea that the tariffs were good for domestic jobs and the economy.
> What is more important to you - having a job and a functioning economy/society, or upholding some "free market" doctrine you've bought into?
This is the definition of a false dichotomy, and you also ignored (or missed) the point completely.
I did not make an argument out of “free market doctrine”. I explained the second order effects that would provide a net reduction in jobs in this country.
My wife’s company is going through this right now. H1Bs are expensive and unpredictable, so the solution is to relocate more of the operations outside of the country and build up those offices.
Failure to understand second order effects and international economies is pervasive in these arguments for heavy regulations. You can do a lot to hold back your country’s companies to force them to pay for employees they don’t need and those few employees benefit for a while, but it collapses when those companies stop hiring in the regulated countries and resume hiring where they can actually operate a business. If you try to regulate them from doing it anywhere, you’ve given their competitors a wonderful gift to come destroy the company completely. Then they’re not making any jobs for anyone.
Does it make sense to you for US companies to be sending wages overseas, supporting a foreign family and economy, when there is someone here in the US, unemployed and equally capable of doing the job?
Trump has certainly been ham-fisted about tariffs, but in a world without tariffs then the country with lowest cost of production, closely related to lowest cost of living, and lowest wages, wins, and this is not going to be the US in most cases. If you follow that path then a high cost country like the US will end up utterly reliant on other countries as it imports almost everything, and loses all domestic manufacturing capability. Sounds familiar?
Legislating against using AI to replace employees could create an unevenly distributed basic income. The idea of limiting AI to socially beneficial efforts is appealing, but I keep coming back to Bell Labs and Xerox PARC. Cool stuff was developed when you gave smart people a playground. Maybe the question should be: How do we give AI a playground and see what it comes up with? Although that could set us up with a situation like in the story Dragon's Egg.
I don’t think the proponents of these ideas care about who does the work. They see it as protection for specific jobs. Basically a jobs program with the costs forced on to large corporations.
As you said, it becomes a great gift to the few people lucky enough (or more usually, with enough nepotistic connections) to get those easy street jobs. It would not help everyone else in the economy.
It would also accelerate moving jobs overseas. Any company that regulates productivity that far downward would be crazy to continue doing automatable work in that country. It just gets moved to foreign offices where they can use AI. There are regulatory maximalists who say we’ll just regulate that, too, but then the whole company relocates to another country. Then some want to try to regulate that, and so on ad infinitum but it’s all layers of holding back your domestic companies so their international competitors can eat their lunch.
You can and should engage in international regulation, as that is the only way to solve international problems.
The idea, capitalism would somehow lead to an ideal world all by itself is demonstrably wrong.
Like we can just do stuff. We can fine companies, take away licenses. We are capable!
But I also think - I’m not trying to be too negative here because certainly we should be investing in scientists and other discoveries, but early tech - xerox park, googles 20 percent time. They were playing in an extremely immature space.
You could throw 20 ideas at a wall and create a billion dollar business.
We should do what you’re saying but we should also build institutions and maybe also limit the extent to which we’re building Elysium. If we can build AI models that rival human intelligence we can create laws to protect its dignity.
Add in the sincere American belief that everyone else is beneath them, and you get the version where they believe even developing countries must accept kneecaping their development so American corporatism doesn't collapse.
Altman or Dario will donate some money to Trump, get cozy with the Department of War and make up a bullshit excuse why Open Source needs to be eliminated.
All access to this technology will be gatekept by a bunch of nasty people who want to eliminate your job as a knowledge worker and put everything behind a subscription.
Careful, you’re making too much sense. The big model providers would much rather the ball be in their court. “Deceleration” meaning Anthropic and OpenAI offer less capabilities for more money in service of “protecting humanity from extinction” rather than penny pinching. A lot of “AI research” coming out of these “labs” (increasingly enterprise) seems to be more driven by a cost benefit analysis from suits rather than genuine contributions to the field. I think the last true innovation was the idea of using doom and ending the human race as a marketing gimmick, which strangely seems to have worked in setting the narrative and captivating the sci-fi imaginations of journalists and techies alike.
Indeed, and the same logic applies as to why allowing companies to replace too many worker's by H1B holders is a bad idea (which equally applies to allowing companies to replace domestic jobs by offshoring).
If you don't hire people, who pay taxes, and take what's left to buy stuff and keep the economy going, then how DOES the economy keep going?
I guess Amodei sees us all on UBI, aka food stamps, so at least the farmers will be selling something, but is OpenAI going to be accepting food stamps to pay for ChatGPT subscriptions? Tesla better be selling it's robots real cheap if it is planning on selling them to people that only have UBI as an income.
A lot of companies trying to replace human labor with AI are either lying (theyre laying off because they over hired and need to correct) or will regret it.
That being said, what's the difference between a company that replaces 5 people with AI and a company who would have otherwise had 5 job openings, but decided to delegate to AI?
Personally, I-d rather be able to reap the economic benefits of AI by having a 4 day workweek. Instead of using AI to replace 1 FTE, use AI to offload 8h of work a day for 5 FTEs.
Of course, this is probably more outlandish than your idea.
(Or, we could just make basic income a thing and no one has to worry about their basic needs, but if they want the new iPhone Duo or a Rivian or other luxuries, they can work for it, but that idea is probably most outlandish of all)
Additionally, unemployment levels are perfectly fine. Clearly this mass unemployment prediction isn't happening yet.
That is because they can allow themselves to do nothing (for some time). Tech was a very high‑paying type of jobs, so workers could afford not to move into lower‑paid sectors, living on the savings they had accumulated beforehand.
In a couple of years market will correct tech-salaries and people will have spent their savings and then there will be your career shifting into healthcare and hospitality roles in large numbers.
People don't use technology to free up their time any more. They use it because technology keeps making life more complicated and tiresome and new tech is a short-term amelioration to that until that too increases the complexity of life some more.
It's not just "companies". Even if the company does nothing, enterprising employees are going to use LLMs to magnify their productivity, which will may reduce the company's need to hire more employees. And except in extremely locked down environments, there's absolutely no way to stop an employee using some open source LLMs to multiply their productivity.
AI is taking all of our jobs. We need to control the means, nay, the pace of production. We should build some kind of barrier, not of concrete and cement but also of the regulatory variety, to stop these agents from coming into our special white color cubicles. It's the only way.