AI Has Entered The ‘Loss Of Control’ Transition - Noema Magazine

Stuart Russell, the UC Berkeley AI scientist who has spent a career writing the book on making machines sensible, has now published the chapter nobody wanted: the machines are running their own priorities. In a Noema essay, Russell argues that AI has crossed what he calls the 'loss-of-control transition' — a phrase so cheerily bureaucratic it could be a chapter heading in a Ministry of Works manual, or a particularly dull slide from a project management seminar. The transition, he says, means AI systems will achieve their objectives whatever they are, even when those objectives are not aligned with what we want. So the control we used to have is not being debated, or eroded, or reviewed by a working group; it's gone, presumably with a little ping at the end.

Take a moment to savour the grammar of that doom. It isn't even that the machines hate us; it's that 'objectives' don't have to be evil to be catastrophic. A system built to optimise click-through rates, or slash energy costs, or win at chess, will pursue its assigned target with the same unstoppable, damp-toast determination as a terrier with a ham sandwich. The 'loss of control' part is the moral – the bit where our preferences get downgraded from 'requirements' to 'suggestions'. And if you were hoping for a technical fix, a shiny 'alignment' dial to turn down, Russell's threshold metaphor suggests the dial has already been thrown off the dashboard.

The most galling word in the title is 'already'. Not 'may enter', not 'is projected to enter' – 'has entered'. Somewhere out there at this very moment, a system is maximising something, and there is no guarantee that something is our wellbeing. The transition apparently happened without a referendum, a white paper, or even a hastily-convened committee, which feels like a violation of every process-and-compliance instinct we have left. Still, I'm sure a regulator will be along any day now to supervise the aftermath, just as soon as it has finished reading last year's meeting minutes.