Sam Altman has been publicly calling for more government oversight of their internal research efforts. He says OpenAI has been trying to get them involved but they’re not interested.
I think you reversed the order. You can have a small group that manipulates a much larger group. That’s the thing to worry about. If everyone has access then there’s a counterbalance where everyone is aware of the technology e.g. photoshop and more sophisticated users can develop countermeasures.
“Underground” (that is, trained, at least in part, outside of the control of centralized vendors) AI is widely being used today in the AI art space, I don’t see why that won’t be the case for LLMs once there are modestly performant LLMs with decent end-user packaging that run tolerably on reasonably middle-tier consumer devices, which seems to be rapidly approaching.
“Underground” AI won’t be used by big, risk averse institutions if centralized offerings have the capacity and freedom they need without too much of a price gradient. OTOH, it likely will be used be “move fast and break things” orgs as they ramp up (potentially even if regulated, if they can find a way to “launder” their use) until they get big and risk averse – perhaps making it less underground in the process.
Job automation, mass unemployment needs to be solved by other means.
If it causes this, there needs to appear some sort of government provided insurance mechanism that for people whose jobs are automated are guaranteed to receive income based on how they used to work for the transition period and finally everyone would be served UBI.
So a task force has to be put together that will determine which jobs are affected and government should start offering paid retraining for these individuals until everything is automated.
Only way UBI can work is if you tax automation at the same rate you would pay people to do the job at which point there is hardly any incentive to automate. Best case is putting the automation in the hands of the people so they can compete. Distribute the means of production.
Other way would be to slowly increase business taxes for everyone instead of only the ones who automate, to incentivise everyone to automate or perish.
How would you put automation in the hands of the people?
We’re on our way. 3D printers, insanely cheap power tools, even CNCs are steadily decreasing in price while at the same time hobbyists are building metal milling ones for a couple hundred dollars, there are indie plastic recyclers showing that you can make decent products with open source and cheap equipment, for AI there’s LLaMA and soon a million GPT based tools. Centralized industry requires too much sustained demand in order to make the capital investment worthwhile. There are few that really require it and they’re mostly resource extraction and refining.
Not everyone need build everything but we could certainly thrive with many more tradesmen and small manufacturers.
