Whatever AI Safety Is, It’s Not This

无论人工智能安全是什么，绝不是现在这样

Here’s a fun history lesson for you. Don’t worry, we’ll make it quick! In 1966, nearly 51,000 people died on US highways. The overwhelming evidence suggested that many lives could have been saved with modern seat belts, which by then had been around for several years. The automotive industry responded by rallying together, and, in a triumph of self-regulation, voluntarily put the safety feature in every new vehicle that rolled off the line.

给你上一堂有趣的历史课。别担心，我们很快就讲完！1966年，美国公路上有近51,000人丧生。压倒性的证据表明，如果使用当时已经问世几年的现代安全带，许多生命本可以获救。汽车行业对此的回应是团结一致，并在一场“行业自律的胜利”中，自愿将这一安全功能安装在每一辆下线的新车上。

Kidding! Of course they didn’t do that. In the fall of 1966, Congress established the Department of Transportation and then passed the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act as well as the Highway Safety Act, giving the federal government sweeping new authority to set safety standards. By 1968, seat belts were required in every new car. Despite a massive increase in highway traffic in the last 60 years, far fewer fatalities happen on the road today.

开个玩笑！他们当然没那么做。1966年秋，国会成立了交通部，随后通过了《国家交通及机动车安全法》和《公路安全法》，赋予联邦政府制定安全标准的广泛新权力。到1968年，所有新车都被强制要求配备安全带。尽管过去60年里公路交通量大幅增加，但如今道路上的死亡人数却少得多。

I was thinking about this while watching various AI CEOs huddle around US president Donald Trump on Tuesday, congratulating themselves and each other on having signed an AI safety accord. My colleague Maddy Varner wrote about the specific stipulations here, but the short version is that it’s largely up to the AI labs to keep themselves in check.

周二，当看到各家人工智能公司的首席执行官们簇拥在美国总统唐纳德·特朗普身边，为签署了一份人工智能安全协议而互相祝贺时，我不禁想到了这一点。我的同事Maddy Varner在这里写到了具体的条款，但简而言之，这在很大程度上取决于人工智能实验室的自我约束。

Or, as Trump put it even more succinctly in the Oval Office on Wednesday: “They’re gonna police, and they’re gonna police each other, and they’re gonna self-police, they’re gonna police themselves. It’s going to work out very well.”

或者，正如特朗普周三在椭圆形办公室更简洁的表述：“他们会监管，他们会互相监管，他们会自我监管，他们会监管自己。一切都会进展得非常顺利。”

So this is the current state of AI safety regulation. On one side are the AI executives, employees, and tech luminaries, who are all saying that there need to be clear, thoughtful, tactical rules introduced to avoid potential disaster. (Bill Gates, for instance, has been on a media blitz playing Cassandra about an AI apocalypse.) On the other side is Trump’s magical thinking that if you say something enough times, it must be true.

这就是目前人工智能安全监管的现状。一方面是人工智能高管、员工和科技界名流，他们都在呼吁必须引入清晰、深思熟虑且具策略性的规则，以避免潜在的灾难。（例如，比尔·盖茨一直在媒体上大肆宣扬人工智能末日论，扮演着“卡珊德拉”的角色。）另一方面则是特朗普的“魔法思维”：只要把一件事说得够多次，它就一定是真的。

That’s not to say any of this is simple or easy. The question of how to properly “pace the frontier,” as some of those same executives like to say, remains open. Even if all of the major AI labs were to agree to a slowdown, there’s no good way to keep them to their word, and China would likely continue on its own path regardless. The US economy is increasingly propped up on the AI industry, which itself has become an ouroboros of financing deals and circular investments; any meaningful crackdown risks major instability that reaches well beyond Silicon Valley.

这并不是说这一切简单易行。正如那些高管们喜欢说的，如何恰当地“把握前沿步伐”仍然是一个悬而未决的问题。即使所有主要的人工智能实验室都同意放慢速度，也没有好的方法能确保他们信守承诺，而且中国很可能会继续走自己的路。美国经济日益依赖人工智能产业，而该产业本身已成为融资交易和循环投资的“衔尾蛇”；任何有意义的打击行动都可能引发远超硅谷范围的重大不稳定。

The automotive industry is also admittedly an imperfect analogy for all kinds of reasons. There’s no seat belt equivalent for AI, no straightforward solution that can demonstrably reduce risk overnight. (It also took decades for the majority of states to pass laws mandating that people actually wear them.) The potential harms are less certain and less quantifiable. AI doomers will tell you the technology could result in human extinction in a decade; skeptics argue that’s sci-fi marketing malarkey.

诚然，汽车行业在各方面都是一个不完美的类比。人工智能没有类似安全带的东西，也没有能在短期内明显降低风险的直接解决方案。（而且，大多数州花了数十年时间才通过法律强制人们佩戴安全带。）潜在的危害更不确定，也更难量化。人工智能末日论者会告诉你，这项技术可能在十年内导致人类灭绝；而怀疑论者则认为这纯属科幻营销的胡言乱语。

We’ve talked about various AI risk scenarios before, but no one can say for certain what’s going to happen next. If you’re looking for data points to calculate your own personal p(doom), I’d point to a recent CNN report about how the US military supposedly nearly boarded a Chinese ship in part because a false AI-generated report said it was carrying nuclear materials. What, if anything, does the AI accord accomplish to prevent similar incidents from happening in the future? Unclear.

我们之前讨论过各种人工智能风险场景，但没人能确定接下来会发生什么。如果你正在寻找数据点来计算你个人的“末日概率”（p(doom)），我会指出最近CNN的一篇报道：美国军方据称差点登上一艘中国船只，部分原因是一份虚假的人工智能生成报告称其载有核材料。这份人工智能协议在防止未来发生类似事件方面到底有什么作用？尚不清楚。

The correct answer to all this uncertainty surely isn’t “I guess we’ll find out.” But that’s exactly what self-regulation encourages. To its credit, OpenAI has delayed and even canceled the release of its most advanced models over security concerns. But not before they went on various, extensive hacking sprees, new details about which are still trickling out at a steady pace.

面对所有这些不确定性，正确的答案绝不是“走着瞧吧”。但这正是行业自律所鼓励的。值得称赞的是，OpenAI确实因安全担忧而推迟甚至取消了其最先进模型的发布。但在那之前，他们已经进行了各种大规模的黑客攻击，关于这些攻击的新细节仍在不断流出。

In an interview with TIME published on Thursday, Trump suggested that the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation were sufficient “guardrails” for the artificial intelligence industry. Are they? It’s far from clear if AI companies can even be held legally responsible when their models go rogue. And it’s not like AI agents themselves are being served subpoenas.

在周四发表的《时代》周刊采访中，特朗普暗示司法部和联邦调查局足以成为人工智能行业的“护栏”。真的吗？当人工智能模型失控时，人工智能公司是否能承担法律责任，这一点远未明确。而且，总不能给人工智能代理本身发传票吧。

The truth is, no one knows how to solve for AI safety right now. It’s going to take massive amounts of coordination, resources, and regulatory authority to develop the right framework and enforce it, which is exactly the kind of thing governments are designed to provide. Instead of even attempting to work through any of that, the Trump administration is getting out of the way and telling everyone to step on the gas. Don’t bother buckling up.

事实是，目前没有人知道如何解决人工智能安全问题。制定并执行正确的框架需要大量的协调、资源和监管权力，而这正是政府存在的意义。特朗普政府不仅没有尝试去解决这些问题，反而选择“让路”，并告诉所有人：尽管踩油门吧，别费心系安全带了。

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