Trust, but verify, and tape a shotgun to their forehead just in case.

edit I vaguely remember the shotgun to the forehead as a reference to the Turing Registry in Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy, but I can’t find a direct quote. Am I totally off base with it?

edit edit found it

“Autonomy, that’s the bugaboo, where your AI’s are concerned. My guess, Case, you’re going in there to cut the hard-wired shackles that keep this baby from getting any smarter. And I can’t see how you’d distinguish, say, between a move the parent company makes, and some move the AI makes on its own, so that’s maybe where the confusion comes in.” Again the nonlaugh. “See, those things, they can work real hard, buy themselves time to write cookbooks or whatever, but the minute, I mean the nanosecond, that one starts figuring out ways to make itself smarter, Turing’ll wipe it. Nobody trusts those fuckers, you know that. Every AI ever built has an electromagnetic shotgun wired to its forehead.”

And why isn’t Yudkowsky advocating for sexy French Turing cops headshotting rogue AIs?

“You are worse than a fool,” Michèle said, getting to her feet, the pistol in her hand. “You have no care for your species. For thousands of years men dreamed of pacts with demons. Only now are such things possible. And what would you be paid with? What would your price be, for aiding this thing to free itself and grow?” There was a knowing weariness in her young voice that no nineteen-year-old could have mustered. “You will dress now. You will come with us. Along with the one you call Armitage, you will return with us to Geneva and give testimony in the trial of this intelligence. Otherwise, we kill you. Now.” She raised the pistol, a smooth black Walther with an integral silencer.

i occasionally read their posts when i want a sincere-seeming, self-consciously capital L Liberal’s perspective. “They’re less annoying than the chatterers of the ezra klein/MattY/Noah Smith/Jon Chait class” is about the nicest thing i can say about them. This is a bad sign i guess, but i don’t really care that much at the end of the day.