There are many reasons I was deeply disappointed that The Washington Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos, chose to kill his newspaper’s editorial endorsing Kamala Harris for president, but none more than the fact that Bezos loves science. And this election coincides with one of the greatest scientific turning points in human history: the birth of artificial general intelligence, or AGI, which is likely to emerge in the next four years and will require our next president to pull together a global coalition to productively, safely and compatibly govern computers that will soon have minds of their own superior to our own.
Donald Trump — who neglected to even appoint a science adviser until more than 18 months into his presidency — is intellectually and temperamentally unsuited to assemble any such global alliance. His administration hastened a vaccine for Covid-19 with one hand and then fostered doubt about using it with the other when it met with a conservative anti-vaccine backlash.
Today, Trump’s first priority is not capitalising on the tremendous opportunities that will come from America leading in the use of AGI nor building a global coalition to govern it, but to impose higher tariffs on our allies to block their exports of cars and toys and other goods to the US. The only technology Trump seems to be deeply interested in is Truth Social, his own version of X. Indeed, since Trump has described himself as a “very stable genius,” he probably doubts that there could even be an artificial intelligence greater than his own.
Kamala Harris, given her background in law enforcement, connections to Silicon Valley and the work she has already done on AI in the past four years, is up to this challenge, which is a key reason she has my endorsement for the presidency.
That said, one of the many oddities of the 2024 presidential election campaign is that it coincided with, but largely ignored, this blossoming of polymathic AGI, which is going to change pretty much everything.
That is because polymathic AI is not just smarter than humans in a single domain. It will have simultaneously mastered physics, chemistry, biology, materials science, mathematics, medicine, astronomy, Shakespeare, art history and a host of other fields better than any human ever could and be able to see patterns cutting across all of them in ways no human ever could — so it can both ask questions and provide answers that no human ever could.
I am writing a book that partly deals with this subject and have benefited from my tutorials with Craig Mundie, the former chief research and strategy officer for Microsoft who still advises the company.
“It is quite conceivable that we will achieve polymathic artificial general intelligence in the next three to five years,” said Mundie, “so it is also likely that our next president, and certainly the one after, will have to cope with the fundamental societal changes that will result.”
We cannot depend on humans overseeing the machines, Mundie said in our interview, “because the machines will outsmart them.” Instead, the proper “moral and ethical groundings aligned with human values have to be built into every smart machine’s DNA.” That will require new understandings among the family of nations on those basic values and how to monitor and enforce them.
The good news is that the Biden-Harris administration has made a good start to this end. Just last Thursday, President Joe Biden signed the first national security memorandum on AI detailing the “guardrails” that the Pentagon, the intelligence agencies and other national security institutions must have in place to ensure that when AI is employed in decisions — from the use of nuclear weapons to granting asylum to immigrants — it reflects our best values.
We cannot afford — we literally cannot afford — not to get this moment right for another reason, one that former British Prime Minister Tony Blair laid out in the smart new book he just published, titled “On Leadership: Lessons for the 21st Century.” As Blair wrote: “The reality facing every developed nation is that the services citizens expect” — from health care to education to transportation to criminal justice to green energy — are now far outstripping the deliverable supply. “The old answer was spend more, tax more. But today, we’re at the limit of public acceptance of tax-and-spend as the answer.” Yet, “expectations haven’t changed.” The only way that governments can deliver the same or better services for the same or less tax receipts is by leveraging technology — and particularly AI.
While we have missed the chance to have this debate during this election, there are five things that will still be true regarding AGI the morning after the voting is over: Polymathic AGI offers us huge, unimaginable opportunities to enable people to live longer, healthier and more abundant lives. It offers us huge risks that cannot be anticipated. We don’t fully understand the extent of either. So, we need to find globally trusted ways to control those risks from AGI while driving incessantly forward to garner the benefits and opportunities. And it is all happening faster than you think.
All of which is to say that if we elect a president next week who is not up to managing this five-point challenge, then the machines are already way smarter than we are. — The New York Times
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