Vitalik Buterin floats ‘soft pause’ on compute in case of sudden risky AI!
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin says a temporary “pause” to worldwide available compute could be a way to “buy more time for humanity” in case of a possibly harmful form of AI superintelligence.
In a Jan. 5 blog post following up his November 2023 post advocating the idea of “defensive accelerationism” or d/acc, Buterin said super intelligent AI could be as little as five years away — and there’s no telling the outcome would be positive.
Vitalik Buterin floats ‘soft pause’ on compute in case of sudden risky AI
Buterin says a “soft pause” on industrial-scale computer hardware could be an option to slow AI development if this happens — reducing global available compute power by up to 99% for 1 to 2 years “to buy more time for humanity to prepare.”
A superintelligence is a theoretical AI model that is typically defined as being far more intelligent than the smartest humans in all fields of expertise.
Many tech executives and researchers have aired concerns about AI, with over 2,600 urging in a March 2023 open letter to halt AI development due to “profound risks to society and humanity.”
Buterin noted that his post introducing d/acc only made “vague appeals to not build risky forms of superintelligence” and wanted to share his thoughts on how to address the scenario “where AI risk is high.”
However, Buterin said he’d only push for a hardware soft pause if he was “convinced that we need something more ‘muscular’ than liability rules,” — which would mean those who use, deploy or develop AI could be sued for damages caused by the model.
He noted proposals for a hardware pause include finding the location of AI chips and requiring their registration but proposed that industrial-scale AI hardware could be fitted with a chip that only allows it to continue running if it gets a trio of signatures once a week from major international bodies.
“The signatures would be device-independent (if desired, we could even require a zero-knowledge proof that they were published on a blockchain), so it would be all-or-nothing,” Buterin wrote. “There would be no practical way to authorize one device to keep running without authorizing all other devices.”
The d/acc idea supported by Buterin advocates for a careful approach to developing technology in contrast to effective accelerationism or e/acc, which pushes for unrestricted and unbridled tech changes. Source…
