Two AI Futures to Choose From
A single perfect AI vs a messy plural world of competing AIs.
There are two contrasting visions of a safe future with powerful AI: Singleton and Plural.
1. Singleton: A single ultra-powerful ASI, designed and built by the most trustworthy people, who also happened to get there first.
2. Plural: A world of broad, democratized access to a multitude of AI models, where the very fact that almost everyone has access to powerful AIs creates a more secure and resilient world.
In the Singleton world, safety comes from the impeccable design and implementation of the AI, built to be fully aligned with human thriving and inherently safe.
In the Plural world, safety comes from the empowerment of billions, the resilience of decentralized systems, and the checks and balances of distributed capabilities.
History favors only one
History doesn’t make me bullish on human well-being or freedom in a Singleton world. Plural societies are the ones that have proven resilient over time, and the ones that have done the most to advance the well being and freedom of their people.
Some make the case that AI is different. That it’s such a powerful technology that we can’t afford the risks of the plural world. The burden of proof is on that side. In the absence of extremely strong evidence (not just hypotheticals) it behooves us to favor the plural world.
The Plural world will be messy and imperfect - like democracy.
The Plural AI world will come with its share of problems. There will be accidents with AI. There will be malicious use of AI. There will be unintended side effects of the deployment of AI.
This is how it has been with every past technology, from the printing press to the internet and cell phones. And yet, every one of those - and the overwhelming majority of all technologies, period - has improved our lives in the aggregate.
Most importantly, the messy, imperfect, sometimes dangerous Plural world avoids the cause of some of the greatest catastrophes of the last century - the over-concentration of power in the hands of any one individual, government, or group.
AI has a spectrum of risks, from the obvious to the hypothetical. The fear of runaway AI is what motivates those who sincerely believe that a Singleton world is the safest. Yet that fear is drawn largely from thought experiments and hypotheticals that rest on a host of unproven assumptions. The fear of over-concentration of power, meanwhile, rests on more than a century of history.
A Plural AI world is the one that best defends us against the unholy combination of tyranny and technology.
I doubt either of your scenarios will quite work out as described. Plurality of models is defintely more likely, but there is no reason to expect anything particulary good about it since every country and organization that can will want to develop, optimize, and use it's own models. More models may help advance the state-of-the-art, but it opens up more possibilities of disaster too. Diversity isn't automatically good and may open the door to misuse. (think a world with a wonderful diversity of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons).