As you’ve likely seen, a strange and perhaps positive chain of events unfolded over the weekend in the world of AI and what we might call human extinction discourse. Dario Amodei, CEO and cofounder of Anthropic, posted an essay calling for a global slow-down in AI development to allow more time to prioritize safety and what the industry calls “alignment” and pledging that Anthropic would take a series of steps in that direction unilaterally. Somewhat surprisingly, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and archvillain Elon Musk stepped forward and said they agreed and appeared to agree to join Anthropic in the proposed slowdown.
Regardless of what one thinks of AI and its possible dangers — existential or otherwise — it’s hard not to see this as at least a somewhat good development. And I say that with full cognizance of the various arguments about financial overextension or heading off sterner regulation that may make these moves self-interested. (AI critic Gary Marcus gives it a qualified endorsement along with a good cross-section of responses.) But I wanted to step back for a moment and talk more generally about the question of “externalities” which has always been the problem lurking in the background of Big Tech’s road to national and global domination.
Before getting into that, a subsidiary point. When you starting digging into debates about AI you realize there’s just a wild cast of characters, groups, movements all arrayed around this technology, some boosters, others critics. A lot of AI critics point to the fact that a number of the leaders, particularly at Anthropic, are part of the so-called “rationalist” community, adjacent to “effective altruism.” And these folks have kind of a cottage industry or cottage subculture which is rife with predicted future extinction events. Is this part of the driver of all these claims about being in a race with AI to make sure it doesn’t decide to exterminate us? I’m really not sure. But it does seem to play some role. (This “rationalist” world — no I’m not totally sure how they got possession of this word — are big in the Valley.) Meanwhile, you’ve got another faction in the tech world, which thinks all that talk of extinction events is a bunch of culty nonsense and/or basically a ruse to allow companies like Anthropic to lock in their dominance as a kind government cartel.
And the interesting thing is that it’s … well, the evil guys, who are on that side of the argument. Particularly David Sacks, who is now Trump’s AI advisor and before that and probably continuing is a like a professional Elon Musk fanboy and courtier. So in response to this proposed slowdown, Sacks put a post on Twitter which basically says, ‘Great, you’re pausing. But don’t pretend you need to suspend anti-trust laws or that all these dangers you whine about can’t be handled by normal market and liability mechanisms.’
“Stop pretending you need a regulatory approval process that supersedes product liability,” to use his words.
Now, I’m certainly not taking the side of David Sacks here, who might best be described as Elon Musk without the charm or the money. But this issue of liability actually is a key one. Indeed it’s not too much to say that the story of Big Tech over the last quarter century has been one of improperly accounted for externalities. We discussed this in an Ed Blog post (“Feral AI and the Question of Externalities”) back in 2023 …
One of the central dynamics of the Internet/digital technology age has been the issue of externalities. Facebook makes billions but leaves a path of destruction and dislocation in its wake that society has to grapple with and pay for. Some of this is just Schumpeterian creative destruction. New technologies and new businesses based on them make old ones obsolete and drive their ruin. We’ve broadly accepted this as a fact and a feature, albeit a disruptive one, of living in a capitalist, free society. But many are more like nuclear power plants that dump their used fuel rods in a local river. The issue isn’t capitalist disruption, it’s the privatization of profit and the socialization of risk.
The rush to bring these tools to market is partly simple profit motive but, even more, something beyond that: the need to be first. Google at least sees the risk that its empire of search, which still drives most of its billions in profit, could be ripped from beneath it by Microsoft — which has the OpenAI franchise and is working to incorporate it into what has always been its sad-sack also-ran search engine, Bing. That’s existential. Hundreds of billions are potentially at stake for both companies. Being first can mean everything — as it did for Google a generation ago. But for society at large, there are other equities in the balance. And there are flashing warning signs here about the need to slow down.
Liability is a legal and economic framework for properly assigning, properly tethering together, the gains and risks/costs associated with economic activity. It’s true that at the extreme end, liability can become so onerous that society loses through lost innovation and economic growth. In practice that’s seldom the problem. A huge, huge amount of the economic powerhouse of Silicon Valley and its concentrated wealth creation has been a matter of pushing off all its downsides onto the public, either collectively or individually. Nuclear power is super, super lucrative if you just fire up a reactor in your backyard with zero containment and throw away the spent fuel rods in the municipal garbage or the local lake.
With AI, laws which properly and securely assigned liability would go at least a decent way to solving some of these problems. The same investors pouring hundreds of billions into frontier AI labs would more clearly see how a few catastrophes could sweep away all that wealth in a moment. Needless to say, markets are not always rational. I would never claim otherwise. But the proper assignment of liability is certainly part of the equation.