EA - The ‘Old AI’: Lessons for AI governance from early electricity regulation by Sam Clarke

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: The ‘Old AI’: Lessons for AI governance from early electricity regulation, published by Sam Clarke on December 19, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Note: neither author has a background in history, so please take this with a lot of salt. Sam thinks this is more likely than not to contain an important error. This was written in April 2022 and we’re posting now as a draft, because the alternative is to never post.Like electricity, AI is argued to be a general purpose technology, which will significantly shape the global economic, military and political landscapes, attracting considerable media attention and public concern. Also like electricity, AI technology has the property that whilst some use cases are innocuous, others pose varying risks of harm.Due to these similarities, one might wonder if there are any lessons for AI governance today to be learned from the development of early electricity regulation and standards. We looked into this question for about two weeks, focusing on early electrification in the US from the late 1800s to the early 1900s, and on the UK’s nationalisation of the electricity sector during the 20th century.This post identifies and examines lessons we found particularly interesting and relevant to AI governance. We imagine many of them will be fairly obvious to many readers, but we found that having concrete historical examples was helpful for understanding the lessons in more depth and grounding them in some empirical evidence.In brief, the lessons we found interesting and relevant are:Accidents can galvanise regulationPeople co-opt accidents for their own (policy) agendas (to various degrees of success)Technology experts can have significant influence in dictating the direction of early standards and regulationTechnology regulation is not inherently anti-innovationThe optimal amount and shape of regulation can change as a technology maturesThe need for interoperability of electrical devices presented a window of opportunity for setting global standardsThe development of safety regulation can be driven by unexpected stakeholdersPervasive monitoring and hard constraints on individual consumption of technology is an existing and already used governance toolThere’s a lot more that could be investigated here—if you’re interested in this topic, and especially if you’re a historian interested in electricity or the early development of technology standards and regulations, we think there are a number of threads of inquiry that could be worth picking up.Accidents can galvanise regulationIn the early days of electrification, there were several high-profile accidents resulting in deaths and economic damage:A lineman being electrocuted in a tangle of overhead electrical wires, above a busy lunchtime crowd in Manhattan, which included many influential New York aldermen.There were a number of other deaths for similar reasons, which occurred somewhat less publicly and so were less influential but still important.Pearl Street Station—the first commercial central power plant in the United States—burned down in 1890.The 1888 blizzard in New York City tore down many power lines and led to a power blackout.Despite electric companies like Western Union and US Illuminating Company protesting regulation with court injunctions, [Hargadon & Doglas 2021] these accidents spurred government and corporate regulation around electrical safety, including:Various governments began to require high voltage electrical lines to be buried underground, one of the first (if not the first) governmental regulations on electricity to be introduced [Stross 2007].Thomson-Houston electric company developed lighting arrestors for power lines and blowout switches to shut down systems in case of a power surge [Davis 2012].Concerned about risks of installing AC e...