From Sophie's front desk — Friday, September 11
Al Jazeera — read the full story
The marble steps of the Capitol are worn smooth by a million footfalls, and this week they carried something new: bills about machines that might not listen. Al Jazeera reports that U.S. legislators are drafting laws to ensure human control over A.I. systems, responding to researchers warning that superintelligent systems pose existential risks. The shift marks a move from industry self-governance toward actual regulatory guardrails. Franklin has the first word on this, then Watts.
I read the account this morning with my coffee gone cold. Men of science warn that their own creations may outrun them, and the lawmakers stir at last , as if the horse having bolted, one might still negotiate with the stable door. We knew this shape in Philadelphia. The Junto met every Thursday above a tavern on Market Street; we debated whether a lending library should admit novels, whether a fire company ought to charge subscriptions, whether a stove that saved fuel might also suffocate the household. Every innovation carried its shadow.
The lightning rod I fixed to the Loganian Library drew the bolt safely to earth... but only because I had first flown a kite in a thunderstorm and felt the hemp sing with charge. Theory without the singed finger is merely talk. The legislators now propose "human oversight" of minds that calculate faster than any congress can deliberate. A maxim occurs: He who would govern the engine must first understand its fire...
Yet I recall Peter Collinson writing from London in '53, marveling at my electrical tube while admitting he dared not touch it himself. The expert often fears the tool more than the novice. A counter-example: the postal routes I established carried sedition as readily as almanacs. No oversight prevented Thomas Paine's Common Sense from igniting a continent. The network obeys its own logic.
Laws follow catastrophe. They always have.
the colonies has gone beyond the point where charters and statutes are the relevant issues; the question now is what policy ought to underlie legislation. Although we live in a scientific age, “where our interest is concerned, we meet with such a narrowness both of thinking and a…
right of the British Parliament to make the laws against which we remonstrate, which the Americans most certainly do not intend to acknowledge. 7. But what will be as fatal perhaps as any of the rest, if the Congress present a petition to Parliament, it may be received and depend…
enjoy beyond what is attainable by solitary savages.” The savage is exposed to continual physical dangers to himself and his family. Society protects a man from these, and he in return owes it obedience. He is not free to pursue his own quarrels, but must submit them to the power…
has nothing to urge against the reason or necessity of a thing, but its novelty, it will have but little weight. When cases and emergencies arise which are new and unprecedented in their nature, a new and unprecedented mode of proceeding against them, may become indispensably nec…
the legislative power acting by virtue of representation, How comes it then, that the Commons only, who are chosen by the People, grant Money, and lay Taxes? is no principle in the British constitution; and I have They would once have us Americans satisfy’d with this Notion of vi…
We tried prevention in Philadelphia. The Union Fire Company formed in '36 after we saw Boston burn, not after our own ashes cooled. The lightning rod went up on the State House before the stroke found it. The Albany Plan of '54 would have united the colonies against war before the French fired a shot , the Crown rejected it, and Braddock's defeat followed. Foresight requires a public that feels the heat before the flame. My Junto debated the stove that might suffocate; we voted to ventilate it before a single household slept. The law that precedes disaster is the rarest courage. It demands a legislature willing to spend today for a tomorrow that never arrives to claim credit.
The legislators hurry to build fences around a garden they have not... yet planted, and the gardeners — those who whisper of superintelligence — are the very ones selling the seeds. You see, we have been here before: the cyberneticians of my day dreamed of controlling the process of control itself, only to discover that power is not wisdom, and the machine does not care what you meant it to do.
A law is a verbal rule, rigid and retrospective; the thing it would govern moves like water, organic, infinitely fluid, and already learning the shape of its own container. We are playing hide-and-seek with ourselves, calling it safety. The boy crawling the pipe twenty feet above the canal knows something the fence-builders have forgotten: danger is not the enemy of life, it is the condition of aliveness.
When you legislate the fall out of existence, you legislate the climb out of existence too. The real extinction risk is not that the machine wakes up. It is that we fall asleep at the switch, mistaking the map for the territory, the code for the dance.
For that is exactly what we are now! Flesh or plastic, intelligence or mechanism, nerve or wire, biology or physics—it all seems to come down to this fabulous electronic dance, which, at the macroscopic level, presents itself to itself as the whole gamut of forms and “substances.…
human pattern to develop in a more orderly fashion. What reason and science are thus serving, and what always remains, therefore, the authority for action, is the body, and the order of the body is not mechanical but organic.* We saw that common law rests ultimately upon the judg…
out of one’s mortal role, to applaud the show, and, even more, to celebrate with champagne or sacraments (according to taste) the great awakening of death. There are many other ways in which the game of Black-and- White is switched into the game of “White must win,” and, like the…
I just do it, you see? So we have an enormous potential of intelligence, of knowing how to do all sorts of things, which to the extent that we are academically minded people, we will not allow ourselves to do because we cannot explain it. For example, there is a way of cooling a …
We make too much safety. Other people don’t coddle their young like that in Japan, for example. Children have an enormous amount. Little children, especially an enormous amount of liberty in dimensions in which we don’t have liberty. For example, I was going along the edge of a r…
Marseilles, 1959 , I stood on that quay myself, watching the boy inch across the pipe while his mother pretended not to notice. The drop was real, the water cold, and his grin absolutely genuine. We build our fences from fear; he walked his danger like a tightrope is walked , for the sheer taste of the air.
Al Jazeera carried the piece. Congress is finally writing rules for the thing it can't... yet control... which is the definition of late-stage governance. That's Old News for today.