Erick Erickson is mad at the lack of laissez-faire free market when it comes to artificial intelligence, which he perceives as not being dangerous. In fact, at one point he says…
Every month we spend building a cabinet-level agency to license what amounts to math is a month the Chinese Communist Party gets for free.
Someone should remind him that physics, the foundation on which nuclear power is really based, just amounts to math.
Then ask him if he wants a close up and personal look at a reactor in operation.
Math is the tool we use to predict what will happen if we apply specific forces to situations, where satellites will be in δ-t, even the slippage in time between us here on the surface of Earth and our GPS satellites.
It only amounts to math? On a machine networked to other machines, from computers to data collection systems to control systems. Yes, including that last.
That’s why this is a laugher, if grim. I won’t comment on specific alleged threats, because I’m not tracking LLM-based AI and whether various specimens have broken out of sandboxes and that sort of thing. But the simple fact that these are running on networked machines makes this more than math. Just what, I’m not sure. But a little caution may save us from looking stupid.
