By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers
The New Threat
The last two years have seen startling advances in
artificial intelligence. The next few years promise far more, with larger and
more efficient models, capable of real creativity and complicated planning,
likely to emerge. The potential positives are astonishing, including heightened
business productivity, cheaper and more effective health care, scientific
discoveries, and education programs tailored to every child’s needs. But the
risks are also colossal. These include the proliferation of disinformation, as
well as job losses, and the likelihood that bad actors will seek to use the new
technology to sow havoc.
This technology will
proliferate rapidly. That means that over the next ten years, grappling with
AI’s inbuilt tendency toward uncontrolled spread will become a generational
challenge. It will, accordingly, require a generational response akin to what
the West mobilized in the early days of the Cold War. At that time, the
American diplomat George F. Kennan talked about containing the Soviet Union by
using hard power and economic and cultural pressure to ensure that the Soviets
were kept behind their borders and the democratic world was not overwhelmed.
Today’s challenge requires a similarly broad and ambitious program, in this
case, to keep AI in check and societies in control. It will be, like Kennan’s,
an effort based on laws and treaties. It will also necessitate, however, a
massive global movement and changes to the culture of technology companies.
This modern form of containment will be needed not only to manage AI and
prevent it from creating catastrophe but also to ensure that it becomes one of
the most extraordinarily beneficial inventions in human history.
The Tide Always Comes In
Across the sweep of
human history, there is a single, seemingly immutable law: every foundational
technology ever invented—from pickaxes to plows, pottery to photography, phones
to planes—will become cheaper and easier to use. It will spread far and wide.
The ecosystem of invention defaults to expansion. And people, who always drive
this process, are Homo technologies, the innately
technological species.
Consider the printing
press. In the 1440s, after Johannes Gutenberg invented it, there was only a
single example in Europe: his original in Mainz, Germany. But just 50 years
later, there were around 1,000 presses spread across the continent. The results
were extraordinary. In the Middle Ages, major countries including France and
Italy each produced a few hundred thousand manuscripts per century. A hundred
years later, they were producing around 400,000 books each year, and the pace
was increasing. In the seventeenth century alone, European countries printed
500 million books.
The same trend was
seen with the internal combustion engine. This was a tricky invention that took
over 100 years to perfect. Eventually, by the 1870s, there were only a few
working examples in German workshops. The technology was still nascent, limited
in number, and utterly marginal. Eight years after he invented the first
practical automobile in 1885, the German engineer Carl Benz had sold just 69
cars. But a little over 100 years later, there were over two billion internal
combustion engines of every conceivable shape and size, powering everything
from lawnmowers to container ships.
Some technologies,
particularly nuclear weapons, may appear to buck this trend. After all, 80
years on from their creation, they have been used only twice, by the United
States in 1945, and arsenals are well down from their 1980s highs. Although
there is some truth to this counterargument, however, it ignores the thousands
of warheads still deployed around the world, the constant pressure of new
states looking to build them, and the hair-raising litany of accidents and
close calls that, from the beginning, have been a regular and, for obvious
reasons, underreported feature of these weapons. From the drama of the Cuban
missile crisis in 1962 to the disappearance of nuclear materials from a U.S.
government employee’s car in 2017, nuclear weapons have never been truly
contained despite the avoidance of outright catastrophe. If such technologies
as nuclear weaponry are an exception to the rule of technological spread, they
are at best a very partial and uneasy exception.
The Impending Deluge
AI will inevitably
follow the trajectory of the hand axe, the printing press, the internal
combustion engine, and the Internet. It, too, will be everywhere, and it will
constantly improve. It is happening already. In just a few years, cutting-edge
models have gone from using millions of parameters, or variables adjusted in
training, to trillions, indicating the ever-increasing complexity of these
systems. Over the last decade, the amount of computation used to train large AI
models has increased by nine orders of magnitude. Moore’s law, which holds that
computing power doubles every two years, predicted exponential increases in
what computers can do. But progress has been even faster in AI, with the trends
of lower costs and improving capability ascending on a curve beyond anything
seen with technology before. The results are visible in well-known AI products
but are also proving transformative under the surface of the digital world,
powering software, organizing warehouses, operating medical equipment, driving
vehicles, and managing power grids.
As the next phase of
AI develops, a powerful generation of autonomous AI agents capable of achieving
real-world goals will emerge. Although this is often called artificial general
intelligence, I prefer the term “artificial capable intelligence,” or ACI,
which is a stage before full AGI, where AI can nonetheless achieve a range of
tasks autonomously. This technology can accomplish complex activities on
humans’ behalf, from organizing a birthday party to completing the weekly shop,
in addition to something as consequential as setting up and running an entire
business line. This will be a seismic step for the technology, with
transformative implications for the nature of power and the world economy. It
can be expected to proliferate rapidly and irreversibly.
An ACI in everyone’s
pocket will result in colossal increases in economic growth, as the most
significant productivity enhancer seen in generations becomes as ubiquitous as
electricity. ACI will revolutionize fields including health care, education,
and energy generation. Above all, it will give people the chance to achieve
what they want in life. There is a fair amount of doomsaying about AI at the
moment, but amid well-justified concerns, it is important to keep in mind the
many upsides of AI. This is particularly the case for ACI, which has the
potential to give everyone access to the world’s best assistant, chief of
staff, lawyer, doctor, and all-around A-team.
Yet the downsides
cannot be ignored. For a start, AI will unleash a series of new dangers.
Perhaps the most serious of these will be new forms of misinformation and
disinformation. Just a few simple language commands can now produce images—and,
increasingly, videos—of staggering fidelity. When hostile governments, fringe
political parties, and lone actors can create and broadcast material that is
indistinguishable from reality, they will be able to sow chaos, and the
verification tools designed to stop them may well be outpaced by the generative
systems. Deepfakes caused turmoil in the stock
market last year when a concocted image of the Pentagon on fire caused a
momentary but noticeable dip in indexes, and they are likely to
feature heavily in the current U.S. election race.
Many other problems
can be expected to result from the global advance of AI. Automation threatens
to disrupt the labor market, and the potential for immense cyberattacks is
growing. Once powerful new forms of AI spread, all the good and all the bad
will be available at every level of society: in the hands of CEOs, street
vendors, and terrorists alike.
Stopping The Spread
Most people’s
attention has correctly focused on the social and ethical implications of this
change. But this discussion often neglects to consider technology’s tendency to
penetrate every layer of civilization, and it is this that requires drastic
action. Technology tends to spread fast, far, and wide and demands that AI must
be contained, both in its proliferation and in its negative impacts, when the
latter does occur. Containment is a daunting task, given the history and the
trajectory of innovation, but it is the only answer—however difficult—to how
humanity should manage the fastest rollout of the most powerful new technology
in history.
Containment in this
sense encompasses regulation, better technical safety, new governance and
ownership models, and new modes of accountability and transparency. All are
necessary—but not sufficient—to assure safer technology. Containment must
combine cutting-edge engineering with ethical values that will inform
government regulation. The goal should be to create a set of interlinked and
mutually reinforcing technical, cultural, legal, and political mechanisms for
maintaining societal control of AI. Governments must contain what would have
once been centuries or millennia of technological change but is now unfolding
in a matter of years or even months. Containment is, in theory, an answer to
the inescapability of proliferation, capable both of checking it and addressing
its consequences.
This is not
containment in the geopolitical sense, harking back to Kennan’s
doctrines. Nor is it a matter of putting AI into a sealed box, although some
technologies—rogue AI malware and an engineered pathogen, in particular—need
just that. Nor is containment of AI competitive, in the sense of seeking to
fight some Soviet Red Menace. It does resemble Kennan’s approach in that the
policy framework must operate across all dimensions. But containing technology
is a much more fundamental program than what Kennan envisioned, seeking a
balance of power not between competing actors but between humans and their
tools. What it seeks is not to stop the technology but to keep it safe and
controlled.
Most people rightly
argue that regulation is necessary, and there is a tendency to believe that it
is enough. It is not. Containment in practice must work on every level at which
the technology operates. It therefore needs not only proactive and well-informed
lawmakers and bureaucrats but also technologists and business executives. It
needs diplomats and leaders to cooperate internationally to build bridges and
address gaps. It needs consumers and citizens everywhere to demand better from
technology and ensure that it remains focused on their interests. It needs them
to agitate for and expect responsible technology, just as the growing demand
for green energy and environmentally friendly products has spurred corporations
and governments into action.
Steering Without A Map
Containment will
require hard technical questions to be answered by international treaties and
mass global movements alike. It must encompass work on AI safety, as well as
the audit mechanisms needed to monitor and enforce compliance. The companies
behind AI will be critical to this effort and will need to think carefully
about how to align their incentives with government regulation. Yet containing
AI will not be the sole responsibility of those building its next generation.
Nor will it rest entirely on national leaders. Rather, all of those who will be
affected by it (that is, everyone) will be critical to creating momentum behind
this effort. Containment offers a policy blend capable of working
from the fine-grained details of an AI model out to huge public programs that
could mitigate vast job destruction.
Collectively, this
project may prove equal to this moment and capable of counteracting the many
risks that AI poses. The cumulative effect of these measures—which must include
licensing regimes, the staffing of a generation of companies with critics, and
the creation of inbuilt mechanisms to guarantee access to advanced systems—is
to keep humanity in the driving seat of this epochal series of changes, and
capable, at the limit, of saying “no.” None of these steps will be easy. After
all, uncontrolled proliferation has been the default throughout human history.
Containment should therefore be seen not as the final answer to all
technology’s problems but rather, as the first critical step.
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