I like the idea of pacing the frontier, but while we’re talking about restrictions, I like restrictions of another sort more. Namely, restricting the use of AI in corporate environments so that it does not destroy the economy as it advances.

The chance of getting broad agreement on “pacing” is fairly low, meaning that all of this likely won’t happen and the race will continue. However, even in the unlikely event that the frontier does get paced, all this does is slow down the economic displacement and not by very much.

If the socially beneficial goals of AI are to make fundamental advancement in medicine and science, then restrict the use of AI to those purposes.

Don’t use AI to replace every job, from graphic designer to accountant to software developer. Place legal restrictions on (at least) large companies such that they may not use AI to replace human labor in this way.

The pitch for AI is always such that everyone’s living standards are increased, yet the actual actions we see are aimed squarely at reducing them. How about the labs put their money where their mouth is and stop trying to replace all human labor, and actually concentrate on the things they claim to care about? And how about introducing legislation to enforce that?

This probably has less chance of happening than pacing the frontier, but it’s the kind of pacing that most people would actually want to see.

> Namely, restricting the use of AI in corporate environments so that it does not destroy the economy as it advances.

Regulate what, exactly?

Limit what AI corporations can use? Other countries would love that more than anything. Basically a free gift to any competitors or any startup that quietly avoids the rules.

There’s a theoretical version where all the countries in the world join hands and agree not to compete with each other, but that’s so impractical that I don’t find it interesting to discuss.

> Place legal restrictions on (at least) large companies such that they may not use AI to replace human labor in this way.

So small companies get the advantage, but large companies don’t? And large companies in other countries also get the advantage?

This is a highly precise way for a country to take out all of their large companies. What would actually happen is that every large company would start the process of relocating to another country right away, accelerating job losses rather than slowing them.

> Namely, restricting the use of AI in corporate environments so that it does not destroy the economy as it advances.

Indeed, and the same logic applies as to why allowing companies to replace too many worker's by H1B holders is a bad idea (which equally applies to allowing companies to replace domestic jobs by offshoring).

If you don't hire people, who pay taxes, and take what's left to buy stuff and keep the economy going, then how DOES the economy keep going?

I guess Amodei sees us all on UBI, aka food stamps, so at least the farmers will be selling something, but is OpenAI going to be accepting food stamps to pay for ChatGPT subscriptions? Tesla better be selling it's robots real cheap if it is planning on selling them to people that only have UBI as an income.

Whenever someone talks about regulation, I always have the same question: How do you enforce it? How do you keep companies from using the replaced talent as a seat warmer? Hire 1 or 2 accountants, give them a chair and a cubicle, and let AI do the rest of the work.

Legislating against using AI to replace employees could create an unevenly distributed basic income. The idea of limiting AI to socially beneficial efforts is appealing, but I keep coming back to Bell Labs and Xerox PARC. Cool stuff was developed when you gave smart people a playground. Maybe the question should be: How do we give AI a playground and see what it comes up with? Although that could set us up with a situation like in the story Dragon's Egg.

You just invented the job equivalent of rent control, and all the problems that ensue from it.

I think Dario is writing with much of these things in mind, but using this as a specific framed opportunity to enable a better interim and long-term outcome for this planet with us still on it. When the internal motives for Dario are fully shared on the other side of the hill, I think we will find his writing to be more about influencing and shaping policy to steer the world in the best way possible within his ability, control, and knowledge. It’s a commonly held believe with the effective altruism community, which Anthropic team was formed under, to use the policy levers to positively influence the world. If I read this latest writing from Dario through that lens, there are deeper concerns with the AI tooling that go well beyond what’s noted in this singular post and are likely the motivations for re-attempting a slowdown or pacing. I too generally agree with for many reasons like allowing the young OpenAI engineers to make mistakes like the Hugging Face incident in July and put better processes in place (ie where is your decent multi-level fencing controls and harness best practices when disabling security features and where is your energy/spend limits for achieving the mission objective in scope and not warming the world for no reason!) and more time to engineer and deploy better hardware to not warm the world instead of burning through fossil fuels since now data centers in the US can isolate pollution from the grid to exempt themselves from federal regulation.

Only token cost can slow down the pace of replacement. If Anthropic were to stop all training and allocate 100% of capacity to inference, will this increase or decrease usage cost? If (for example) Fable came down to the cost of Sonnet, corporations will absolutely jam in the gas pedal.

> stop trying to replace all human labor

A lot of companies trying to replace human labor with AI are either lying (theyre laying off because they over hired and need to correct) or will regret it.

That being said, what's the difference between a company that replaces 5 people with AI and a company who would have otherwise had 5 job openings, but decided to delegate to AI?

Personally, I-d rather be able to reap the economic benefits of AI by having a 4 day workweek. Instead of using AI to replace 1 FTE, use AI to offload 8h of work a day for 5 FTEs.

Of course, this is probably more outlandish than your idea.

(Or, we could just make basic income a thing and no one has to worry about their basic needs, but if they want the new iPhone Duo or a Rivian or other luxuries, they can work for it, but that idea is probably most outlandish of all)

The whole point of technology is to replace work that we don't want to do. You are attacking the chief reason why people use technology in the first place.

Additionally, unemployment levels are perfectly fine. Clearly this mass unemployment prediction isn't happening yet.

This is a call to end capitalism. Its completely impossible to do what you suggest with the incentives of capitalism.

You can "pace" yourself like that if you want. Don't shove your idiotic self-destructive ideas on to others. If you were president during invention of cars, we'd still be horse riding everywhere.

>Don’t use AI to replace every job, from graphic designer to accountant to software developer. Place legal restrictions on (at least) large companies such that they may not use AI to replace human labor in this way.

It's not just "companies". Even if the company does nothing, enterprising employees are going to use LLMs to magnify their productivity, which will may reduce the company's need to hire more employees. And except in extremely locked down environments, there's absolutely no way to stop an employee using some open source LLMs to multiply their productivity.

> Don’t use AI to replace every job, from graphic designer to accountant to software developer. Place legal restrictions on (at least) large companies such that they may not use AI to replace human labor in this way.

AI is taking all of our jobs. We need to control the means, nay, the pace of production. We should build some kind of barrier, not of concrete and cement but also of the regulatory variety, to stop these agents from coming into our special white color cubicles. It's the only way.