As I explain in these videos, AI doom is nonsense. AI is not nonsense, though.
At a high level, USG should respond to AI by giving up on its faux 18th-century nonsense hat-and-musket larp ideology and all its consequent paperwork, deciding today is the first day of the rest of its life, and hiring a good king. If this task seems too much for us, idk. Try a CEO search firm?
Since, due to Satan’s many snares and wiles, this is not about to happen, let’s stick to describing how a national CEO would respond to the AI crisis (it is a crisis!) right now.
AI is a tool. It is not magic. AI does not act. Humans act, with the power of our tools. The power of this tool has not even created new risks. It has made old risks, which we should have addressed long ago, unacceptably urgent.
The first risk is cybersecurity. The USG should work with frontier labs and major open-source repositories to categorize every significant project by risk. Projects with safety risks (insecure languages, ambient authority, etc) should have a red-team rating. Anyone using the project can see when, how, and by whom it was pentested. The USG should identify high-risk codebases and itself organize testing, ideally with prerelease frontier models.
In parallel, the SEC should require a software-safety audit in every public company’s reports. All internal software exposed to the public, and all open-source dependencies, must be pen tested, or the company has unacceptable hacking risks and must not pass an audit. To ensure national security, all this work must be done by US citizens and/or US AI labs.
The second risk is biosecurity. The USG must establish and maintain a biosecurity filter which all DNA synthesis must pass. It does not just “grep for smallpox,” but finds anything like a viral motif. The filter is automated and runs in less than a minute, in a secure enclave which does not save or export data. It is not open source.
All DNA synthesis labs must run this filter. All new benchtop synthesis machines must connect to it remotely over the Internet. All old benchtop DNA synthesizers must be turned in for upgrade or replacement in the next six months, after which they are illegal to possess. Foreign governments need to be given no good reason not to comply with these measures, or at least build their own.
That’s over. That’s all. That’s the memo. Go back to your deranged golem fantasies.