Thread by @s_r_constantin

Ok, I'm a little scared to put my reputation at risk by saying this, but I think it's important and I think there's a chance I have enough of a platform that speaking up can matter. So here goes.

I'm concerned that the meme of "AI risk" is being perverted to destructive ends.

AI does have risks, some of them near-term. "Deepfake" autogenerated text and images that look real could industrialize misinformation. There are risks associated with autonomous vehicles and weapons going awry. And of course strong AI could be unimaginably dangerous.

But these are very different threat scenarios from each other, and once they're "messaged" for the nontechnical public, the "AI risk" meme becomes distorted into incoherence, with a single bottom line: "technology is dangerous and needs more supervision."

This fits very well with a cultural moment that seems to be crying for "regulate the internet, it's doing things we never expected, and we never elected these techies!"

This creates a sort of "eat me last" dynamic. Technologists who can tell that other social agents want a piece of their "pie" (in terms of both economic resources and governance power) sometimes try to preempt attack by saying "we'll help you regulate cyberspace!"

I'm starting to hear proposals that governments should have backdoors into any sufficiently large assemblage of computing power, on the grounds of AI safety.

I find this worrisome on free-speech grounds, on privacy grounds, on all the traditional civil libertarian grounds that seem so "uncool" in 2019.

I also find it worrisome that there are essentially calls for slowing down and adding more governance to a relatively freewheeling and dynamic industry (software), and making it work more like "mature" industries. Mature industries innovate less.

And it's *especially* disturbing that I don't see any pushback, not even verbal pushback *by* technologists who are generally chatty on the internet. Not even from my friends. Not even from "heterodox" right-wingers.

I know: you look kind of weak and not with-it if you say "actually, I think we should be free to do our thing; our thing is mostly good", when you can sense that the currents of power are trending towards illiberalism. But maybe *don't be a weenie*?

Do you *really* want to go from being a creative intellectual to making sure you get a lock on those sweet DOD contracts? Do you really think it's *good* for positive-sum creation to be turned into zero-sum rent-seeking? If not, then maybe say so?

People talk about all sorts of dumb and misguided stuff. There are *so* many open racists on Twitter, for instance. Surely it shouldn't be scarier to say "rent-seeking is bad" than to say the far more heinous stuff that "politically incorrect" culture warriors do?