EA - Some quotes from Tuesday's Senate hearing on AI by Daniel Eth

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Some quotes from Tuesday's Senate hearing on AI, published by Daniel Eth on May 17, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.On Tuesday, the US Senate held a hearing on AI. The hearing involved 3 witnesses: Sam Altman, Gary Marcus, and Christina Montgomery. (If you want to watch the hearing, you can watch it here – it's around 3 hours.)I watched the hearing and wound up live-tweeting quotes that stood out to me, as well as some reactions. I'm copying over quotes to this post that I think might be of interest to others here. Note this was a very impromptu process and I wasn't originally planning on writing a forum post when I was jotting down quotes, so I've presumably missed a bunch of quotes that would be of interest to many here. Without further ado, here are the quotes (organized chronologically):Senator Blumenthal (D-CT): "I think you [Sam Altman] have said, in fact, and I'm gonna quote, 'Development of superhuman machine intelligence is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity.' You may have had in mind the effect on jobs, which is really my biggest nightmare in the long run..."Sam Altman: [doesn't correct the misunderstanding of the quote and instead proceeds to talk about possible effects of AI on employment]Sam Altman: "My worst fears are that... we, the field, the technology, the industry, cause significant harm to the world. I think that could happen in a lot of different ways; it's why we started the company... I think if this technology goes wrong, it can go quite wrong, and we want to be vocal about that. We want to work with the government to prevent that from happening, but we try to be very clear eyed about what the downside case is and the work that we have to do to mitigate that."Sam Altman: "I think the US should lead [on AI regulation], but to be effective, we do need something global... There is precedent – I know it sounds naive to call for something like this... we've done it before with the IAEA... Given what it takes to make these models, the chip supply chain, the sort of limited number of competitive GPUs, the power the US has over these companies, I think there are paths to the US setting some international standards that other countries would need to collaborate with and be part of, that are actually workable, even though it sounds on its face like an impractical idea. And I think it would be great for the world."Senator Coons (D-DE): "I understand one way to prevent generative AI models from providing harmful content is to have humans identify that content and then train the algorithm to avoid it. There's another approach that's called 'constitutional AI' that gives the model a set of values or principles to guide its decision making. Would it be more effective to give models these kinds of rules instead of trying to require or compel training the model on all the different potentials for harmful content? ... I'm interested also, what international bodies are best positioned to convene multilateral discussions to promote responsible standards? We've talked about a model being CERN and nuclear energy. I'm concerned about proliferation and nonproliferation."Senator Kennedy (R-LA): "Permit me to share with you three hypotheses that I would like you to assume for the moment to be true... Hypothesis number 3... there is likely a berserk wing of the artificial intelligence community that intentionally or unintentionally could use artificial intelligence to kill all of us and hurt us the entire time that we are dying... Please tell me in plain English two or three reforms, regulations, if any, that you would implement if you were queen or king for a day..."Gary Marcus: "Number 1: a safety-review like we use with the FDA prior to widespread deployment... Number 2: a nimble monitoring agency to follow what's going ...