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large and remote—into a centralized, secure, and encrypted system that can scan for pathogenic sequences is a great start. If people are printing potentially harmful sequences, they’re flagged. Cloud based, free, cryptographically secure, it updates in real time.
Xi’s fears came to pass on October 7, 2022. America declared war on China, attacking one of those choke points. This didn’t involve missiles shooting over the Taiwan Strait. There wasn’t a naval blockade of the South China Sea or marines storming the Fujian coastline. It came instead from an unlikely source: the Commerce Department. The shots fired were export controls on advanced semiconductors, the chips
The new export controls have made it illegal for U.S. companies to sell high-performance computing chips to China and for any company to share the tools to manufacture these chips, or provide the know-how to repair existing chips.
The most advanced semiconductors (generally involving processes under fourteen nanometers, that is, fourteen-billionths of a meter, distances representing as few as twent...
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parts, design, software, services—for use in areas like artificial intelligence and supercomputing are now subject to stringent licensing. Leading American chip companies like NVIDIA and AMD can no longer supply Chinese customers with th...
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In AI, the lion’s share of the most advanced GPUs essential to the latest models are designed by one company, the American firm NVIDIA. Most of its chips are manufactured by one company, TSMC, in Taiwan, the most advanced in just a single building, the world’s most sophisticated and expensive factory. TSMC’s machinery to
make these chips comes from a single supplier, the Dutch firm ASML, by far Europe’s most valuable and important tech company. ASML’s machines, which use a technique known as extreme ultraviolet lithography and produce chips at levels of astonishing atomic precision, are among the most complex manufactured goods in history. These three companies have a choke hold on cutting-edge chips, a technology so physically constrained that one estimate argues they cost up to $10 billion per kilogram.
OpenAI. Global data traffic travels through a limited number of fiber-optic cables bunched in key pinch points (off the coast of southwest England or Singapore, for example). A crunch on the rare earth elements cobalt, niobium, and tungsten could topple entire industries.
80 percent of the high-quality quartz essential to things like photovoltaic panels and silicon chips comes from a single mine in North Carolina.
Skills, too, are a choke point: the number of people working on all the frontier technologies discussed in this book ...
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I don’t just want to talk about and debate containment. I want to proactively help make it happen, on the front foot, ahead of where the technology is going.
Containment needs technologists utterly focused on making it a reality.
These were cool, friendly companies building a shiny future. That has changed. Yet as the voices of critique have grown much louder, it’s notable how few and far between their successes are.
Indeed, at times shrill criticism just becomes part of the same hype cycle as technology itself.
Credible critics must be practitioners.
On the industry side this growth is even faster; ethical AI research with industry affiliations is up 70 percent year on year. Once, it would have been strange to find moral philosophers, political scientists, and cultural anthropologists working in tech, now less so.
believe that figuring out ways to reconcile profit and social purpose in hybrid organizational structures is the best way to navigate the challenges that lie ahead, but making it work in practice is incredibly hard.
We wanted to ensure that Google understood this and put in place a commitment to broaden our governance beyond us technologists. Ultimately, I wanted to create a global, multi-stakeholder forum for deciding what would happen with AGI when or if it was achieved, a kind
The most sophisticated AI systems or synthesizers or quantum computers should be produced only by responsible certified developers. As part of their license, they would need to subscribe to clear, binding security and safety standards, following rules, running risk assessments, keeping records, closely monitoring live deployments.
Inspired by a mythical figure called Ned Ludd, weavers across the English Midlands grew angry and organized. They refused to accept that picture, that proliferation would be the default and the wave of technology breaking around them was an economic inevitability. They decided to fight back.
The Luddite protests began to peter out, stamped down by a draconian set of laws and counter-militias. Around this time, England had only a few thousand automatic looms. But by 1850 there were a quarter of a million. The battle had been lost, the technology diffused, the old life of weavers destroyed, the world changed. To those losing out, this is what an uncontained wave of technology looks like.
children and grandchildren and that are enjoyed unthinkingly by you and me today. Back then, the Luddites failed to contain technology. But humanity adapted anyway. The challenge today is clear. We have to claim the benefits of the wave without being overwhelmed by its harms. The Luddites lost their
The coming wave is going to change the world. Ultimately, human beings may no longer be the primary planetary drivers, as we have become accustomed to being. We are going to live in an epoch when the majority of our daily interactions are not with other people but with AIs.
