🤖 5 fascinating questions — and answers — about AI

Will AI destroy humanity? Can AI replace markets? How can AI boost economic growth? And more!

Jul 03, 2023

Quote of the Issue

“Mitigating the risk of extinction with the use of AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale technological solutions such as preventing pandemics with biotechnology and mitigating climate change by generating clean energy through nuclear fission and fusion” - James Pethokoukis

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Q&A

🤖 5 fascinating questions — and answers — about AI

A happy American Independence Day to all! I decided to use this holiday week as an opportunity to create a mini-symposium from some of my many recent interviews on the recent advances in artificial intelligence. Hope you find it useful and thought-provoking.

1/ Why isn’t AI going to kill us all?

Technology journalist Timothy Lee: “The main reason is that the physical world is very complicated. Right now, there just are not enough robots and other mechanisms for internet-based intelligence to have big impacts on the physical world. I think there are a couple exceptions to that. Certainly if we screwed up and connected nuclear missiles to the internet, you could imagine then some rogue AI or some form of power using nuclear weapons to kill us all. I've heard scenarios where maybe AI helps somebody create a new killer virus that then is synthesized and kills everybody. I don't think that's impossible. But I think the kind of solution to that is to regulate labs that are used for biology and to be very careful with nuclear missiles. A lot of people are worried about a more general situation where the AI becomes so powerful that it “takes over the world.”

“I just don't see how that would happen because it's actually pretty difficult. The example I like to look at is times when hackers have tried to cause carnage in the real world. One of the best examples is in Ukraine. In 2015 during the conflict there, Russian hackers tried to shut down part of the Ukrainian electrical grid, and they succeeded in doing that. But then the engineers running that system went in and bypassed the computer and turned the system back on. It was a few hours of disruption; it wasn't like an existential threat to Ukraine. There really are very few examples where hackers or people on the internet have caused big physical problems, because the physical world is complicated and pretty robust.”

2/ Do we need new regulations or agencies to govern AI?

Technology policy analyst Adam Thierer: “The current policy debate over artificial intelligence is haunted by many mythologies and mistaken assumptions. The most problematic of these is the widespread belief that AI is completely ungoverned today. As I detailed in a recent R Street Institute report, nothing could be further from the truth. Our federal government is massive—2.1 million employees, 15 cabinet agencies, 50 independent federal commissions and over 430 federal departments—and many government officials have already started considering how they might address AI and robotics.

“Many agencies have broad power to regulate specific algorithmic or robotic risks that could arise in their respective areas, and they are already using that authority. Some of the most active agencies include the Federal Trade Commission, the Food and Drug Administration, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Consumer Product Safety Commission. The courts and our common law system are also starting to address novel AI problems as cases develop.

“We can fill governance gaps as needed from that starting point. Algorithmic systems may create new challenges in some contexts and require additional policies to address things like predictive policing or law enforcement use of AI or robotic technologies, among other things.”

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3/ It is possible to have AI replace the price mechanism and markets?

AEI economist Michael Strain: “There are technological and even physical dimensions to that question that I'm just not sure about. For example, if a computer were able to make those sorts of resource allocation decisions for an economy with 330 million people, is there enough energy to power that computer? I don't know the answer to that question, but that’s one very important dimension that needs to be explored to fully answer that question.

‘But even assuming that those sorts of computational and physical obstacles can be overcome, I think my answer to your question is, yes and no. Yes, I think we could have a more efficient, more successful Soviet-style system where the central computer sends everybody an email and tells them what their career will be and how long they have to work. It monitors their job performance, and it decides who to promote and who not to. It makes sure that the economy is producing enough bread and makes sure the economy is producing enough amoxicillin and makes sure that the economy is producing enough houses. I think the technology could assist autocrats that have that ambition.

“But I don't think technology would ever be able to do that as well as a decentralized, market-based system can do it. The reason for that is because it would be very hard for a computer or an artificial intelligence system to incorporate people's aspirations and people's hopes and people's dreams for the future and dreams for their children's futures.

“Take a young person who doesn't do well on standardized tests but is really determined to succeed and goes off to start a business, or through sheer grit and determination is able to enter into one of the lucrative professions in our economy. An AI system could look at that test result from when that person was 12 years old, but I think it would be hard to see into that person's heart and to build that into the system. The same thing with innovators and entrepreneurs, and over a long enough period of time, those folks have a disproportionate impact in fueling long-term prosperity. And I think the world where we leave those types of decisions to individuals and where resource allocation decisions are decentralized, ultimately, is a world that will be much, much better than the one where those sorts of decisions are made by a computer — even a really smart computer.”

4/ How will AI make us more innovative?

University of Pennsylvania economist Jesús Fernández-Villaverde: “What artificial intelligence is fantastic at is searching for patterns among all existing ideas and helping us to become so much better at sorting them out and recombining them. What is the problem we have faced over the last 20 or 25 years? It has become harder and harder to even know the ideas that already exist. I try to teach graduate students what the frontier of the field is. In my area of economics, once you finish the regular PhD courses, in 1996 or 1997, it would take you 12 months to learn all that’s out there. Now it takes you at least 24 months. It's much harder just to understand everything, to keep track of everything. What artificial intelligence is great at is helping you explore what already exists, find it out, and combine it in much more innovative ways. So artificial intelligence can definitely help us grow more. … I see three scenarios. Scenario one is that there are fewer people and we are running out of ideas. Let me call that the pessimistic scenario. One year ago I gave a 50 percent probability to that negative scenario. There is a middle-of-the-road scenario where we keep growing more or less at the same speed as before. One year ago, I gave it 40 percent probability. Artificial intelligence is so great, we grow much faster: I gave that 10 percent probability. After ChatGPT and everything we have seen over the last few months, I have reduced the 50 percent to 40 percent, the 40 percent to 30 percent, and [raised] the 10 percent probability of growing much faster to 30 percent. It’s a significant increase in my forecast. Now, my forecast is still that the most likely scenario is we slow down. I'm cautiously more optimistic than one year ago, but I'm still not wildly optimistic.”

5/ What's the elevator pitch for AI optimism?

Nvidia AI engineer Bojan Tunguz: “All of the remarkable progress in all of human history, and especially over the past few centuries, has been a direct consequence of productively harnessing human intelligence. Even though the past few centuries have also been marked by incredible tragedies and catastrophes, our increased prosperity has generally made us kinder to each other. AI has the potential to go way beyond the constraints of biological intelligence, and in a matter of years help us accomplish what otherwise would have taken centuries. The prospects of overcoming our current most intractable problems — political, social, economic, medical, technological — are the biggest arguments in favor of pushing for AI development.”

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