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Nick Bostrom’s curiously exaggerated expectations of government regulation of AI

I’m not a fan of Bostrom’s work but he’s clearly an astute analyst in many ways. I found this expectation from Superintelligence pg 213 thought provoking in its political naïveté, not least of all expressed in the assumption that technology firms aren’t already bound up in the national security infrastructure.

An important question, therefore, is whether national or international authorities will see an intelligence explosion coming. At present, intelligence agencies do not appear to be looking very hard for promising AI projects or other forms of potentially explosive intelligence amplification. If they are indeed not paying (much) attention, this is presumably due to the widely shared perception that there is no prospect whatever of imminent superintelligence. If and when it becomes a common belief among prestigious scientists that there is a substantial chance that superintelligence is just around the corner, the major intelligence agencies of the world would probably start to monitor groups and individuals who seem to be engaged in relevant research. Any project that began to show sufficient progress could then be promptly nationalized. If political elites were persuaded by the seriousness of the risk, civilian efforts in sensitive areas might be regulated or outlawed.

How difficult would such monitoring be? The task is easier if the goal is only to keep track of the leading project. In that case, surveillance focusing on the several best-resourced projects may be sufficient. If the goal is instead to prevent any work from taking place (at least outside of specially authorized institutions) then surveillance would have to be more comprehensive, since many small projects and individuals are in a position to make at least some progress.

It would be easier to monitor projects that require significant amounts of physical capital, as would be the case with a whole brain emulation project. Artificial intelligence research, by contrast, requires only a personal computer, and would therefore be more difficult to monitor. Some of the theoretical work could be done with pen and paper. Even so, it would not be too difficult to identify most capable individuals with a serious long-standing interest in artificial general intelligence research.

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