Israeli Prime Minister, Musk and Tegmark on AI Safety

By Michaël Trazzi @ 2023-09-18T23:21 (+23)

This is a linkpost to https://twitter.com/netanyahu/status/1703823935060451628?s=20

Israeli Prime Minister, Musk, Tegmark and Brockman discuss existential risk from AI.

Nothing truly revolutionary was said. I think the most interesting bits are that the Prime Minister seems to be taking AI risk seriously, has in mind exponential progress, wants to prevent monopolies and thinks that we roughly have 6 years before things change drastically.

Some quotes from the prime minister:

I had a conversation with one of your colleagues, Peter Thiel, and he said to me, "Oh, it's all scale advantages. It's all monopolies." I said, well, yeah, I believe that, but we have to stop it at a certain point because we don't want to depress competition.

AI is producing, you know, this wall [hands movement gesture some exponential progress wall]. And you have these trillion dollar companies that are produced what, overnight? And they concentrate enormous wealth and power with smaller and smaller number of people. And the question is, what do you do about that monopoly power?

With such power comes enormous responsibility. That's the crux of what we're talking about here, is how do we inject a measure of responsibility and ethics into this, into this exponentially changing development?

Max [Tegmark]'s book takes you to the existential question of whether, you know, you project basically machine intelligence or human intelligence into the cosmos. Human intelligence turned into machine intelligence, into the cosmos and so on. That's a big philosophical question. I'd like to think we have about six years for that.

I think we have to conduct a robust discussion with the other powers of the world based on their self-interest as you began to do. And I think that's a pioneering work. And I think we have a shot maybe at getting to some degree of control over our future, which could be amazing.

Chris Leong @ 2023-09-18T23:45 (+5)

Damn. Given his focus on competition, it wouldn’t surprise me if this ends up being net-negative. Instead we need to be limiting the proliferation of capabilities.

Gerald Monroe @ 2023-09-19T00:00 (+3)

If you think it's like a nuclear weapon but better (less indiscriminate, potentially offers a defense against the nukes of rival countries) what choice do you have? Notably Israel has a nuclear arsenal for precisely this reason, now they see a need to get the next weapons upgrade.

Chris Leong @ 2023-09-19T02:47 (+3)

I'm skeptical of it offering an effective defense against other countries AI's which is where that reasoning breaks down.

Gerald Monroe @ 2023-09-19T03:00 (+3)

Can you elaborate? Note that geopolitically Israel doesn't need to beat superpowers. It has hostile neighbors it is concerned about.

It also is a small isolated country with a low population and low natural resources and is in an endless low level war over a small amount of land. So it needs high value industries to survive. Getting a share of the possible near future AI boom is a way to do that. Intel owns a company in Israel that has an inference accelerator that is competitive, Habana labs, and there is also Mobileye.

So it needs AI as a weapon to defend itself against the AIs of Syria and Egypt and Iran and other nearby threats. It needs it as a revenue source to afford to keep buying endless weapons to deal with lower level attacks.

What is your disagreement and how do you know it's a valid reason?

Chris Leong @ 2023-09-19T13:00 (+4)

I suspect the offender defence balance massively favours the attacker and so if AI is widely distributed we’re all screwed.

Guy Raveh @ 2023-09-19T17:59 (+4)

Some context on Netanyahu:

  1. He's in the middle of both 3 personal corruption trials and a so-called "judicial overhaul" by his coalition (which we opposed to it call an autocratic coup attempt). He might say he's interested in doing this or that, but in reality his coalition is solely focused on this judicial overhaul and on the narrow needs of Ultra-orthodox party leaders.

  2. He's been a politician for a few decades, and he's the longest serving prime minister in Israeli history. During that time he's earned a reputation as someone whose words and actions are utterly disconnected from eachother. Moreover, even his messages to foreign and domestic media are often very different from eachother.

  3. He's a hard neoliberal from the Chicago school. He's not randomly mentioning competition - it's the only thing he cares about. "[Concentrating] enormous wealth and power with smaller and smaller number of people" on the other hand is something he has absolutely no problem with. He's done that for himself in our political context, and he loves befriending billionaires whose money and influence he can use for personal gain.

  4. As I mentioned, he's the longest serving prime minister in our history. None of his governments has ever tried to deal with existential or catastrophic risks of any kind. It's not in his dictionary. The only 'existential threat' from his perspective is Iran.

  5. Israel is extremely reluctant to do anything that's not for its own benefit. I guess it might be a remnant of Europe trying to kill all our grandparents.

So, even though there's some activity starting here in academic circles (mostly thanks to David Manheim), I wouldn't count on the Israeli government to move even a finger about it anytime soon.

Oliver Sourbut @ 2023-09-20T14:42 (+3)

The stream cut out, but there are longer versions available e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dg-rKXi9XYg