> Over time, it has allowed a fierce competitiveness and mounting pressure for ever more funding to erode its founding ideals of transparency, openness, and collaboration
Team Helen acted in panic, but they believed they would win since they were upholding the principles the org was founded on. But they never had a chance. I think only a minority of the general public truly cares about AI Safety, the rest are happy seeing ChatGPT helping with their homework. I know it's easy to ridicule the sheer stupidity the board acted with (and justifiably so), but take a moment to think of the other side. If you truly believed that Superhuman AI was near, and it could act with malice, won't you try to slow things down a bit?
Honestly, I myself can't take the threat seriously. But, I do want to understand it more deeply than before. Maybe, it isn't without substance as I thought it to be. Hopefully, there won't be a day when Team Helen gets to say, "This is exactly what we wanted to prevent."
[1]: https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/02/17/844721/ai-openai...
Pretty soon AI will be an expert at subtly steering you toward thinking/voting for whatever the "safety" experts want.
It's probably convenient for them to have everyone focused on the fear of evil Skynet wiping out humanity, while everyone is distracted from the more likely scenario of people with an agenda controlling the advice given to you by your super intelligent assistant.
Because of X, we need to invade this country. Because of Y, we need to pass all these terrible laws limiting freedom. Because of Z, we need to make sure AI is "safe".
For this reason, I view "safe" AIs as more dangerous than "unsafe" ones.
But I assume, from y our language, you'd also object to making this a government utility.
And the controlling party de jour will totally not tweak it to side with their agenda, I'm sure. </s>
What do you image a neutral party does? If youu're talking about safety, don't you think there should be someone sitting on a boar dsomewhere, contemplating _what should the AI feed today?_
Seriously, why is a non profit, or a business or whatever any different than a government?
I get it: there's all kinds of governments, but now theres all kind of businesses.
The point of putting it in the governments hand is a defacto acknowledgement that it's a utility.
Take other utilities, any time you give a prive org a right to control whether or not you get electricity or water, whats the outcome? Rarely good.
If AI is suppose to help society, that's the purview of the government. That's all, you can imagine it's the chinese government, or the russian, or the american or the canadian. They're all _going to do it_, thats _going to happen_, and if a business gets there first, _what is the difference if it's such a powerful device_.
I get it, people look dimly on governments, but guess what: they're just as powerful as some organization that gets billions of dollars to effect society. Why is it suddenly a boogeyman?
Seriously, Businesses simply dont have the history that governments do. They're just as capable of violence.
https://utopia.org/guide/crime-controversy-nestles-5-biggest...
All you're identifying is "government has a longer history of violence than Businesses"