Technology is not an adversary; it’s a basic property of human society. Containing technology needs to be a much more fundamental program, a balance of power not between competing actors but between humans and our tools. It’s a necessary prerequisite for the survival of our species over the next century. Containment encompasses regulation, better technical safety, new governance and ownership models, and new modes of accountability and transparency, all as necessary (but not sufficient) precursors to safer technology. It’s an overarching lock uniting cutting-edge engineering, ethical values,
Technology is not an adversary; it’s a basic property of human society. Containing technology needs to be a much more fundamental program, a balance of power not between competing actors but between humans and our tools. It’s a necessary prerequisite for the survival of our species over the next century. Containment encompasses regulation, better technical safety, new governance and ownership models, and new modes of accountability and transparency, all as necessary (but not sufficient) precursors to safer technology. It’s an overarching lock uniting cutting-edge engineering, ethical values, and government regulation. Containment shouldn’t be seen as the final answer to all technology’s problems; it is rather the first, critical step, a foundation on which the future is built. Think of containment, then, as a set of interlinked and mutually reinforcing technical, cultural, legal, and political mechanisms for maintaining societal control of technology during a time of exponential change; an architecture up to the task of containing what would have once been centuries or millennia of technological change happening now in a matter of years or even months, where consequences ricochet around the world in seconds. Technical containment refers to what happens in a lab or an R&D facility. In AI, for example, it means air gaps, sandboxes, simulations, off switches, hard built-in safety and security measures—protocols for verifying the safety or integrity or uncompromised nature of ...
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Humanity’s Circuit Breaker: Technical, Cultural, and Legal Containment
