Mavens in the field of artificial intelligence, including architects of notorious “generative AI” systems like ChatGPT, now publicly express shared dread of terrible outcomes that might be wrought by their own creations. Many now call for a moratorium, or pause in AI development, allowing time for existing nations and institutions to innovate systems of control.
Why this sudden wave of concern? Amid the toppling of many clichéd assumptions, we’ve learned that so-called Turing tests are irrelevant, providing no insight at all into whether generative large language models—GLLMs or “gollems”—are actually sapient beings. They will feign personhood, convincingly, long before there’s anything or anyone “under the skull.”
Anyway, that distinction now appears less pressing than questions of good or bad—or potentially lethal—behavior.
Some remain hopeful that a merging of organic and cybernetic talents will lead to what Reid Hoffman and Marc Andreesen have separately called “amplification intelligence.” Or else we might stumble into lucky synergy with Richard Brautigan’s “machines of loving grace.” But worriers appear to be vastly more numerous, including many elite founders of a new Center for AI Safety who fret about rogue AI misbehaviors, from irksome all the way to “existentially” threatening human survival.
Some short-term remedies, like citizen-protection regulations recently passed by the European Union, might help, or at least offer reassurance. Tech pundit Yuval Noah Harari proposed a law that any work done by gollems or other AI must be so labeled. Others recommend heightened punishments for any crime that’s committed with the aid of AI, as with a firearm. Of course, these are mere temporary palliatives.
Let’s be clear-eyed about whether any “moratorium” will slow down AI advances in the slightest. As expressed succinctly by Caltech cyber scientist Yaser Abu-Mostafa: “If you don’t develop this technology someone else will. Good guys will obey rules … The bad guys will not.”
’Twas ever thus. Indeed, across the whole span of human history, just one method ever curbed bad behavior by villains, ranging from thieves to kings and feudal lords. I refer to a method that never worked perfectly and remains deeply flawed, today. But it did at least constrain predation and cheating well enough to spur our recent civilization to new heights and many positive-sum outcomes. It is a method best described by one word.
Accountability.
Those opining about synthetic intelligence today generally ignore lessons taught both by nature and by history.
Nature, because—as Sara Walker explains in Noema—similar patterns can be found in the rise of earlier life forms, across four billion years. Indeed, generative AI might be compared to an invasive species, now spreading without constraint into a novel and naïve ecosystem. An ecosystem based on new kinds of energy flows. One that consists of the internet, plus millions of computers and billions of impressionable human minds.
And history, because our own human past is rich with lessons taught by so many earlier tech-driven crises, across 6,000 years. Times when we adapted well, or failed to do so—e.g., the arrival of writing, printing presses, radio, and so on. And again, only one thing ever limited predation by powerful humans exploiting new technologies to aggrandize their predatory power.
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