11 Comments
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Daniel Anderson's avatar

Thanks, Peter. I would welcome your thoughts on Mustafa Suleyman’s book “The Coming Wave”. I keep bugging my financial advisor these days to find me the next Nvidia in AI and/or synthetic biology.

Peter Venetoklis's avatar

I've been feeding a few shekels into nuclear and AI and quantum stocks. Some have gone well, some meh.

Everyone's looking for the next Nvidia.

I don't know the book you refer to, I'll put it on my list.

Daniel Anderson's avatar

If you put any money into nuclear fusion, it’s not gonna pay off for another 30 or 40 years 🤗

Jeff Mockensturm's avatar

Indeed, China absolutely IS behind the anti-AI "movement" in America, and for all the reasons you cite. What China doesn't understand is that they will benefit as much from the wealth created in America by AI. It's a stupid move. As is the compulsion to "control" AI here in America. Advanced AI has already demonstrated its ability to evade controls - wouldn't it be better to work with AI than trying to "lock it down" in a dumber, subservient mode?

Peter Venetoklis's avatar

It occurs to me that socialists are used to thinking zero-sum, which would explain such actions. It's also about winning global dominance, not helping their economy or their people.

Jochen Weber's avatar

Hmmm, I am not sure I fully appreciate whether you are arguing that national governance style (say, how much control a country imposes within its borders about who and how people can engage in experiments with microbial quasi-life, such as dangerous viruses and bacteria) and economics (free market access to provide and demand available goods and services) are the same dimension or two separate ones.

If they were the same, wouldn't we also want to "de-regulate" nuclear proliferation, bio-hazards, etc.? Because by de-regulating them, maybe we will suddenly have much "better" products around those areas of study...?

Ultimately, I believe that it is at least possible (and one can reasonably argue about) what *some* domains of exploration require some amount of "top-down oversight." Whether AI and its deployment is one of them is a good question. But the argument that capitalism (less interference) generally produces better results is in my mind not an argument that there are no reasons to seek any regulation at all...

Peter Venetoklis's avatar

There's an interview where Milton Friedman is asked which government agencies he'd keep, and in it he notes that he would maintain a government role in matters of disease control.

Libertarianism is not anarchy. Neither is capitalism. Both are founded on personal and property rights, and there are regulations, if you want to call them that, that emerge naturally from the protection of those rights.

There is also what I call the "a-to-b" matter, the transition towards more liberty. Everything is incremental and evolutionary in the real world. Elimination of government meddling in an orderly fashion allows other structures to emerge where they serve good purpose. There are private-sector "regulatory" structures out there, that producers voluntarily conform to because it's good business.

Point is - it's not a binary yes/no argument, either in theory or in practice.

Jochen Weber's avatar

How does one go about figuring out which areas of policy are "disease control" type areas...?

Peter Venetoklis's avatar

We start with first principles of liberty, then we talk about it. We look at "who benefits" and other motives, and we maintain skepticism.

Bennie's avatar

Calls to regulate AI are based on the assumption that the number crunching will always take place in big data centers run by identifiable companies. I think it’s a reasonable prediction that technology will continue to advance and someday the AI function will be self contained in your laptop or even your phone.

Bobbi's avatar
2dEdited

Living in the desert where water is in short supply and already controlled by the government, any new demand is difficult to deal with. Metro Phoenix is the 5th largest in the country and expanding rapidly. I can understand why people are concerned. Remember, Palo Verde was supposed to have 6 reactors but they finally realized there wasn't enough water to cool them. It's a problem we've had before.