500 words or 3,300 characters summary instead of a 300 pages book. My other summaries are here
He is great entrepreneur in AI, Wikipedia about him
Victor:
– His “ideal society model” is the following: that technology is a blessing, but it has super-risks, so, therefore the authorities/society must take actions + he invites us “let’s be afraid together” =)
– Book is quite long (publishers’ standards, I know, I know)
Key idea
– That in coming years AI will advance + improve synthetic biology & robotics. These 3 techs generate agents operating autonomously in the world -> the problem of containment (otherwise super-risks in coming decades for our bio civilization: from inequality (in favor of AI, robots, of more developed countries), failure of nation states, bioterrorism (COVID was a kindergarten), super-authoritarianism, maybe AGI)
I. Homo technologicus
All tech for 10K years helped to grow the population + always spread massively/cheaper, speed of this diffusion grows. Nuclear weapons are a rare example when it was possible to achieve relative non-proliferation. Modern Civilization = (Life + Intelligence) * Energy
II. Big wave
– Realized the power of neural networks when they solved the game Go (after 3 moves of 2*10^15 combinations) in AlphaGo & defeated the world champion. Then applied AlphaGo to the so-called protein folding problem
– Generative AI is a passed stage, now LLM – when billions of parameters will become trillions (Moore’s law). Turing test needs to be upgraded. Whether AI has consciousness? I don’t care, it just distracts us
– Similar acceleration in DNA: life is 3.7B years old, and now synthetic bio+ DNA printers (democratization) -> will be explosion of creativity. Regulations/ethics are lagging, COVID is a leak of so-called gain of function experiments (ethically wrong)
– China puts $ into science as much as USA = tech race of nations, facilitated by modern science’s openness, preprint sites, open source & Github
– Last 50 years GDP grew 6x, now can 2x more, +$100T in 50 years
– 3 integral features of the world: nationalism, capitalism, science
III. Risks
– At the age of 21 went into ecology + London mayor’s office, but after Facebook’s success realized thatinfluence of tech is greater than politics
– The world is fragile (increasing complexity, hackers) + risk of authoritarianism by cameras (as in China), conspiracy theories (QAnon), info wars through disinformation
– Tech is a form of power, access to tech is democratizing, always shifts the balance of power: e.g. drones for$2K must be shot down w/ Patriot missiles of $1M each
– You can have a shock crisis with synthetic biology. Or you can stagnate like civilizations before, or like aging now Japan, Korea, EU, RU
IV. Containment
– What to do? Implement sophisticated regulation faster. Dilemma for countries: non-proliferation vs. remain competitive. Also, world of atoms was easier to control than world of bits
– Raise world’s awareness of the problem (scientists, country authorities, people) that the task of containment is critical
– No simple answers, but let’s develop steps: safety culture, require tech audits, buy civilization time, international agreements at the UN level, let practitioners from their fields criticize, taxes on tech/leading firms, generate a demand for containment from societies