Social Innovation – Theoreti.ca

Pacing the Frontier

We request that the U.S. government support an international effort to develop the technical and governance tools needed to deliberately pace the frontier of automated AI development.

Over a 1000 employees of frontier AI companies, including Dario Amodei, have issued a statement, Pacing the Frontier, that calls for the AI governance. Some of the things to note:

It is similar to the 2023 Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter that was also signed by all sorts of important people (and some unimportant people like me. In both, the idea is that we need to go more slowly if we are to make sure that AI is safe and used for good.
This version doesn’t ask the AI labs to “immediately pause”, but asks for the U.S. government to “support an international effort” which is an interesting shift. That international effort already exists in the form of the network of AI Safety Institutes set up after the Bletchley Summit. (I am on the Research Council of the Canadian AISI.) I also note that the statement calls for “support” not leadership. This is realistic as few countries are likely to sign up to be led by the U.S. right now. This U.S. Administration has squandered any international good will they had, at least from Canada.
Another difference is the call for “governance tools.” This sounds a lot like the “regulation” word that normally isn’t welcome in innovation focused circles. To be fair there are other sorts of tools that can be used to govern companies and products. Many exist now, they just have to be used. The problem is that governing is something humans do. No amount of tools left on the shop floor of government are going to substitute for consistent, public, articulate governing. Who has a track record doing this? Who would trust the U.S. to support them?
I should add that “technical and governance tools” sounds again like a techno-solutionism where you solve problems that arise from the poor governance of technology with more technology. (See Morozov’s book To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism.)
Finally, I should mention that the opening to the Statement has a now tired hinge statement of the sort “AI will save us all, BUT ….” where after the hinge (the BUT) there is a little problem raised for which, of course, the authors have a solution.

AI could help create a dramatically better future, but that outcome is not guaranteed. The world’s leading AI companies believe they could be close to automating AI research. It is hard to predict exactly how much this will accelerate AI progress, but there is a real risk that capability development rapidly accelerates beyond our ability to understand or control the resulting systems.

To realize AI’s potential, industry, government, and society at large may need the option to buy time to address emerging risks, develop security measures, and strengthen oversight. But each company—and country—is under intense competitive pressure not to unilaterally slow that acceleration. And today, the world lacks the technical and governance tools to deliberately pace frontier-wide progress.

Internet Archive closes the National Emergency Library

Within a few days of the announcement that libraries, schools and colleges across the nation would be closing due to the COVID-19 global pandemic, we launched the temporary National Emergency Library to provide books to support emergency remote teaching, research activities, independent scholarship, and intellectual stimulation during the closures. […]

According to the Internet Archive blog the Temporary National Emergency Library to close 2 weeks early, returning to traditional controlled digital lending. The National Emergency Library (NEL) was open to anyone in the world during a time when physical libraries were closed. It made books the IA had digitized available to read online. It was supposed to close at the end of June because four commercial publishers decided to sue.

The blog entry points to what the HathiTrust is doing as part of their Emergency Temporary Access Service which lets libraries that are members (and the U of Alberta Library is one) provide access to digital copies of books they have corresponding physical copies of. This is only available to “member libraries that have experienced unexpected or involuntary, temporary disruption to normal operations, requiring it to be closed to the public”.

It is a pity the IS NEL was discontinued, for a moment there it looked like large public service digital libraries might become normal. Instead it looks like we will have a mix of commercial e-book services and Controlled Digital Lending (CDL) offered by libraries that have the physical books and the digital resources to organize it. The IA blog entry goes on to note that even CDL is under attack. Here is a story from Plagiarism Today:

Though the National Emergency Library may have been what provoked the lawsuit, the complaint itself is much broader. Ultimately, it targets the entirety of the IA’s digital lending practices, including the scanning of physical books to create digital books to lend.
The IA has long held that its practices are covered under the concept of controlled digital lending (CDL). However, as the complaint notes, the idea has not been codified by a court and is, at best, very controversial. According to the complaint, the practice of scanning a physical book for digital lending, even when the number of copies is controlled, is an infringement.

DARIAH Virtual Exchange Event

This morning at 7am I was up participating in a DARIAH VX (Virtual Exchange) on the subject of The Scholarly Primitives of Scholarly Meetings. This virtual seminar was set up when DARIAH’s f2f (face-2-face) meeting was postponed. The VX was to my mind a great example of an intentionally designed virtual event. Jennifer Edmunds and colleagues put together an event meant to be both about and an example of a virtual seminar.

One feature they used was to have us all split into smaller breakout rooms. I was in one on The Academic Footprint: Sustainable methods for knowledge exchange. I presented on Academic Footprint: Moving Ideas Not People which discussed our experience with the Around the World Econferences. I shared some of the advice from the Quick Guide I wrote on Organizing a Conference Online.

Recognize the status conferred by travel
Be explicit about blocking out the time to concentrate on the econference
Develop alternatives to informal networking
Gather locally or regionally
Don’t mimic F2F conferences (change the pace, timing, and presentation format)
Be intentional about objectives of conference – don’t try to do everything
Budget for management and technology support

For those interested we have a book coming out from Open Book Publishers with the title Right Research that collects essays on sustainable research. We have put up preprints of two of the essays that deal with econferences:

The organizers had the following concept and questions for our breakout group.

Session Concept: Academic travel is an expense not only to the institutions and grant budgets, but also to the environment. There have been moves towards open-access, virtual conferences and near carbon-neutral events. How can academics work towards creating a more sustainable environment for research activities?

Questions: (1) How can academics work towards creating a more sustainable environment for research activities? (2) What are the barriers or limitations to publishing in open-access journals and how can we overcome these? (3) What environmental waste does your research produce? Hundreds of pages of printed drafts? Jet fuel pollution from frequent travel? Electricity from powering huge servers of data?

The breakout discussion went very well. In fact I would have had more breakout discussion and less introduction, though that was good too.

Another neat feature they had was a short introduction (with a Prezi available) followed by an interview before us all. The interview format gave a liveliness to the proceeding.

Lastly, I was impressed by the supporting materials they had to allow the discussion to continue. This included the DARIAH Virtual Exchange Event – Exhibition Space for the Scholarly Primitives of Scholarly Meetings.

All told, Dr. Edmonds and DARIAH colleagues have put together a great exemplar both about and of a virtual seminar. Stay tuned for when they share more.