Life, Liberty, and Superintelligence

Are American institutions ready for the AI age?

3QuarksDaily pointed me to an essay in Arena on Life, Liberty, and Superintelligence. The essay starts with the question that Dario Amodei tackled in Machines of Loving Grace, namely, what might be the benefits of artificial intelligence (AI). It then questions whether we could actually achieve the potential benefits without the political will and changes needed to nimbly pivot.

Benefits: Amodei outlined a set of domains where intelligence could make a real difference, including:

  • Biology and health,
  • Neuroscience and mind,
  • Economic development and poverty, and
  • Peace and governance.

Amodei concluded with some thoughts on Work and meaning, though the loss of work and meaning may not be a benefit.

It is important that we talk about the benefits as massive investments are made in infrastructure for AI. We should discuss what we think we are going to get other than some very rich people and yet more powerful companies. Discussion of benefits can also balance the extensive documentation of risks.

Institutions: The essay then focuses on whether we could actually see the benefits Amodei outlines even if we get powerful AI. Ball points out that everyone (like JD Vance) believes the USA should lead in AI, but questions if we have the political will and appropriate institutions,

Viewed in this light, the better purpose of “AI policy” is not to create guardrails for AI — though most people agree some guardrails will be needed. Instead, our task is to create the institutions we will need for a world transformed by AI—the mechanisms required to make the most of a novus ordo seclorum. America leads the world in AI development; she must also lead the world in the governance of AI, just as our constitution has lit the Earth for two-and-a-half centuries. To describe this undertaking in shrill and quarrelsome terms like “AI policy” or, worse yet, “AI regulation,” falls far short of the job that is before us.

There could be other countries (read China) who may lag when it comes to innovation, but are better able to deploy and implement the innovations. What sort of institutions and politics does one need to be able to flexibly and ethically redesign civil institutions?

US State Dept. to use AI to Revoke Visas of Foreign Students who appear “pro-Hamas”

Axios has a story about how the State Department is launching a programme to review social media of foreign students to see if they are “pro-Hamas.” If they appear to support Hamas then they may get their visas revoked.

A senior official is quoted as saying “it would be negligent for the department that takes national security seriously to ignore publicly available information about [visa] applicants in terms of AI tools. … AI is one of the resources available to the government that’s very different from where we were technologically decades ago.”

There are obvious free-speech issues, but I also wonder at the use of AI to police speech. What will be policed next? Pro-EDI speech?

Thanks to Gary Marcus’ Substack for this.

Responsible AI Lecture in Delhi

A couple of days ago I gave an Institute Lecture on What is Responsible About Responsible AI at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, India. In it I looked at how AI ethics governance is discussed in Canada under the rubric of Responsible AI and AI Safety. I talked about the emergence of AI Safety Institutes like CAISI (Canadian AI Safety Institute.) Just when it seemed that “safety” was the emergent international approach to ethics governance, Vice President JD Lance’s speech at the Paris Summit made it clear that the Trump administration in not interested,

The AI future is not going to be won by hand-wringing about safety. (Vance)

IIT Delhi DH 2025 Winter School

Arjun Ghosh invited me to contribute to the DH 2025 Winter School at IIT Delhi. I’m teaching a 6-day workshop on Voyant as part of this Winter School. You can see my outline here (note that I am still finishing the individual pages.) Some thoughts:

  • There is a real interest in DH in India. Arjun had over 500 applications for 25 places. I doubt we would have that many in Canada.
  • As can be expected, there is a lot of interest handling Indian languages like Hindi or Tamil.
  • There are a number of social scientists at the School. The humanities and social sciences may not be as clearly distinguished here.
  • There was an interesting session on digital libraries given by a data librarian at UPenn.

The Ends of Safety

The AI future is not going to be won by hand-wringing about safety. (Vance)

At the Paris Summit, Vice President JD Vance gave a speech indicating a shift in US policy towards AI including a move away from “safety” as a common ethical ground. He also discussed how:

  • The US intends to dominate in AI, including chip manufacturing, though other countries can join them.
  • They want to focus on opportunity not guardrails.
  • They need reliable energy to power AI, which I take to mean non-green energy.
  • AI should be free of “ideology” by which he probably means “woke” language.

He apparently didn’t stay to hear the response from the Europeans. Nor did the USA or the UK sign the summit Statement on Inclusive and Sustainable Artificial Intelligence for People and the Planet that included language saying,

Harnessing the benefits of AI technologies to support our economies and societies depends on advancing Trust and Safety. We commend the role of the Bletchley Park AI Safety Summit and Seoul Summits that have been essential in progressing international cooperation on AI safety and we note the voluntary commitments launched there. We will keep addressing the risks of AI to information integrity and continue the work on AI transparency.

This marks a shift from the consensus that emerged from the Bletchley Declaration from 2023 which led to the formation of the UK AI Safety Institute and the US AI Safety Institute and the Canadian AI Safety Institute (etc.).

With Vance signalling the shift away from safety the UK has renamed its AISI the AI Security Institute (note how they substituted “security” for “safety”). The renamed unit is going to focus more on cybersecurity. It looks like the UK, unlike Europe, is going to try to stay ahead of a Trump ideological turn.

The US AI Safety Institute (AISI), which was set up with a small budget by NIST. is likely to also be affected (or have its acronym changed.)

Trump eliminates Biden AI policies

Trump has signed an Executive Order “eliminating harmful Biden Administration AI policies and enhancing America’s global AI dominance.” (Fact Sheet) In a Fact Sheet he calls Biden’s order(s) dangerous and onerous using the usual stifling innovation argument:

The Biden AI Executive Order established unnecessarily burdensome requirements for companies developing and deploying AI that would stifle private sector innovation and threaten American technological leadership.

There are, however, other components to the rhetoric:

  • It “established the commitment … to sustain and enhance America’s dominance to promote human flourishing, economic competitiveness, and national security.” The human flourishing seems to be
  • It directs the creation of an “AI Action Plan” within 180 days to sustain dominance. Nothing is mentioned about flourishing in regards to the plan. Presumably dominance is flourishing. This plan and review of policies will presumably where we will see the details of implementation. It sounds like the Trump administration may keep some of the infrastructure and policies. Will they, for example, keep the AI Safety Institute in NIST?
  • There is an interesting historic section reflecting back to activities of the first Trump administration noting that “President Trump also took executive action in 2020 to establish the first-ever guidance for Federal agency adoption of AI to more effectively deliver services to the American people and foster public trust in this critical technology.” Note the use of the word “trust”. I wonder if they will return to trustworthy AI language.
  • There is language about how “development of AI systems must be free from ideological bias or engineered social agendas.” My guess is that the target is AIs that don’t have “woke” guardrails.

It will be interesting to track what parts of the Biden orders are eliminated and what parts are kept.

 

Humanity’s Last Exam

Researchers with the Center for AI Safety and Scale AI are gathering submissions for Humanity’s Last Exam. The submission form is here. The idea is to develop an exam with questions from a breadth of academic specializations that current LLMs can’t answer.

While current LLMs achieve very low accuracy on Humanity’s Last Exam, recent history shows benchmarks are quickly saturated — with models dramatically progressing from near-zero to near-perfect performance in a short timeframe. Given the rapid pace of AI development, it is plausible that models could exceed 50% accuracy on HLE by the end of 2025. High accuracy on HLE would demonstrate expert-level performance on closed-ended, verifiable questions and cutting-edge scientific knowledge, but it would not alone suggest autonomous research capabilities or “artificial general intelligence.” HLE tests structured academic problems rather than open-ended research or creative problem-solving abilities, making it a focused measure of technical knowledge and reasoning. HLE may be the last academic exam we need to give to models, but it is far from the last benchmark for AI.

One wonders if it really will be the last exam. Perhaps we will get more complex exams that test for integrated skills. Andrej Karpathy criticises the exam on X. I agree that what we need are AIs able to do intern-level complex tasks rather than just answering questions.

Do we really know how to build AGI?

Sam Altman in a blog post titled Reflections looks back at what OpenAI has done and then predicts that they know how to build AGI,

We are now confident we know how to build AGI as we have traditionally understood it. We believe that, in 2025, we may see the first AI agents “join the workforce” and materially change the output of companies. We continue to believe that iteratively putting great tools in the hands of people leads to great, broadly-distributed outcomes.

It is worth noting that the definition of AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) is sufficiently vague that meeting this target could become a matter of semantics. None the less, here are some definitions of AGI from OpenAI or others about OpenAI,

  • “OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI)—by which we mean highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work—benefits all of humanity.” – Note the “economically valuable work”. I wonder if philosophizing or making art is valuable? Is intelligence being limited here to economics?
  • “AI systems that are generally smarter than humans” – This is somewhat circular as brings us back to defining “smartness”, another work for “intelligence”.
  • “any system that can outperform humans at most tasks” – This could be timed to the quote above and the idea of AI agents that can work for companies outperforming humans. It seems to me we are nowhere near this if you include physical tasks.
  • “an AI system that can generate at least $100 billion in profits” – This is the definition used by OpenAI and Microsoft to help identify when OpenAI doesn’t have to share technology with Microsoft any more.

Constellate Sunset

The neat ITHAKA Constellate project is being shut down. It sounds like it was not financially sustainable.

As of November 2024, ITHAKA made the decision to sunset Constellate on July 1, 2025. While we’re proud of the meaningful impact Constellate has had on individuals and institutions, helping advance computational literacy and text analysis skills across academia, we have concluded that continuing to support the platform and classes is not sustainable for ITHAKA in the long term. As a nonprofit organization, we need to focus our resources on initiatives that can achieve broad-scale impact aligned with our mission. Despite Constellate’s success with its participating institutions, we haven’t found a path to achieve this broader impact.

It sounds like this sort of analytical support is best supported in universities by courses, workshops etc. Constellate developed cool notebooks (available in GitHub), courses built on the notebooks, and webinar recordings.