In the last chapter of [[The Coming Wave]], Suleyman offers "ten steps toward containment." He invites us to picture the steps as concentric circles. The first step involves a relatively small number of people who are directly involved in developing emerging technologies. Each subsequent steps opens up to broader sections and sectors of society, requiring different kinds of inputs and interventions. %%Suleyman draws inspiration from Kevin Esvelt's work on biosecurity, which aims to contain biological risks by **delay, detection, and defense**.%% Below is the list and one-line description from the book,^[ibid, p. 339] with additional context on each item. 1. **Technical safety**: "Concrete technical measures to alleviate possible harms and maintain control." Recommendations include an Apollo-like program in AI safety, advocating for increased funding, legislation mandating a minimum percentage of corporate R&D budgets for safety, rigorous pre-deployment testing for advanced AIs, and the creation of a fail-safe off switch. 2. **Audits**: "A means of ensuring the transparency and accountability of technology." To verify the safety and integrity of AI systems, methods such as access rights, audit capacity, and adversarial testing are useful. The practice of "red teaming" is a proactive strategy to uncover potential failure modes by attacking systems in controlled environments. "Scalable supervision" and mathematical verification to demonstrate the non-harmful nature of algorithms help ensure that actions and outputs are safely constrained. 3. **Choke points**: "Levers to slow development and buy time for regulators and defensive technologies." There are various points along the supply chain where capacity and power is highly concentrated, including advanced chip manufacturing (where companies like NVIDIA, TSMC, and ASML dominate the supply chain for advanced GPUs and manufacturing equipment), cloud computing (dominated by six companies), and AGI developers (most notably OpenAI and Google DeepMind). Additionally, the limited number of experts and rare earth elements essential for tech advancements represent significant bottlenecks. 4. **Makers**: "Ensuring responsible developers build appropriate controls into technology from the start." Suleyman emphasizes that those involved in technology development bear the primary responsibility for proving the safety and effectiveness of their creations and for devising solutions to potential problems. Moreover, he underscores that credible critiques of technology should come from those with hands-on experience in the field, highlighting the importance of practitioner-led oversight. 5. **Businesses**: "Aligning the incentives of the organizations behind technology with its containment." Suleyman advocates for the development of new, accountable, and inclusive business models for exponential technologies like AI and synthetic biology, emphasizing the need to balance safety and profitability. He suggests the creation of companies inherently designed to contain technology, exploring hybrid organizational structures that align profit motives with social purposes. 6. **Government**: "Supporting governments, allowing them to build technology, regulate technology, and implement mitigation measures." Suleyman advocates for increased governmental involvement in technology development, standard-setting, and cultivating technical expertise. Monitoring and transparently documenting technology-induced harms are highlighted as crucial steps for learning and improvement. The proposal suggests shifting towards a licensed environment for AI and other advanced technologies, with stringent requirements based on the technology's capabilities, to ensure responsible development. Additionally, Suleyman calls for a tax overhaul focusing on capital, including a tax on automation, to support security and welfare during the transition from labor to capital. A significant re-skilling and education initiative is also recommended to prepare and empower communities for the future. 7. **Alliances**: "Creating a system of international cooperation to harmonize laws and programs." A global agreement akin to the nuclear treaty would establish universal guidelines for managing and mitigating the impacts of advanced technologies. Suleyman proposes the creation of a dedicated regulator, the AI Audit Authority (AAA), to oversee these efforts. This body would navigate complex geopolitical landscapes, avoid excessive intervention, and pragmatically monitor developments based on objective criteria. 8. **Culture**: "A culture of sharing learning and failures to quickly disseminate means of addressing them." This cultural shift is crucial for ensuring that safety is not sidelined but integrated into the core ethos of technology development. Implementing precautionary measures, encouraging reflection on the broader impacts of technological advancements, and moving beyond the traditional "just-go-for-it" engineering mindset towards a more cautious approach are highlighted as essential steps for achieving containment and safety in technology. 9. **Movements**: "All of this needs public input at every level, including to put pressure on each component and make it accountable." Suleyman underscores the power of collective action and popular pressure in driving societal change, highlighting that historical transformations have often resulted from deliberate efforts by people to establish new norms. He posits that significant shifts occur when there is a widespread demand for change, suggesting that neither technologists nor governments can address the challenges of advanced technologies in isolation. 10. **Coherence**: "Ensuring that each element works in harmony with the others, that containment is a virtuous circle of mutually reinforcing measures and not a gap-filled cacophony of competing programs." Suleyman emphasizes that the nine steps above need to interact in a coherent way for containment to be possible, and that any individual step alone is insufficient. Importantly, **containment is an ongoing process**, not a final end state to arrive at. It's "a narrow and treacherous path, wreathed in fog, a plunging precipice on either side, catastrophe or dystopia just a small slip away; you can’t see far ahead, and as you tread, the path twists and turns, throws up unexpected obstacles."^[ibid, p. 342] "The narrow path must be walked forever from here on out, and all it takes is one misstep to tumble into the abyss."^[ibid, p. 344] --- Topics: - [[The AI Revolution and the Tapestry of Tomorrow (Index)]] Related notes: - [[Containment of advances in AI is likely not possible]] - [[Containment of emerging technologies requires strong nation-states and cohesive societies at a time when they are fragile and divided]]