Technological Containtment
Description
"What is containment, and what is it for? “Containment is the overarching ability to control, limit, and, if need be, close down technologies at any stage of their development or deployment [...] It means preserving the ability to steer waves to ensure their impact reflects our values, helps us flourish as a species, and does not introduce significant harms that outweigh their benefits.”
What containment looks like: Containment is implemented as a set of interlinked and mutually reinforcing technical, cultural, legal, and political mechanisms for maintaining societal control of technology.
Has containment been tried, and has it ever worked? It has been tried with the printing press, the crossbow, and the flying shuttle. Or as general resistance to outside tech by the Tokugawa shogunate of Japan in the 17th century, or the Qianlong emperor of China in the 18th. None of these attempts worked in the long run."
(Paraphrased from The Coming Wave, Mustafa Suleyman, 2023)
Policy
Proposals in the Coming Wave, chapter 14, by Mustafa Suleyman:
"Chapter 14: Ten Steps Toward Containment
Proposal – a layered containment strategy with ten points:
- Promote a Program to Advance Technical Safety – Concrete technical measures to alleviate possible harms and maintain control should be advanced by governments and corporations.
- Implement Comprehensive and Transparent Audits – A means of ensuring the transparency and accountability of technology should be implemented by orgs and governments.
- Create Choke Points to Buy Time – Levers to slow development and buy time for regulators and defensive technologies.
- Critics Should Become Makers Building Safe Tech – Ensure responsible developers build appropriate controls into technology from the start.
- Corporate Governance Models that Unite Profit and Purpose – Align the incentives of the organizations behind technology with its containment.
- Effective States and Effective Regulation – Support governments, allowing them to build technology, regulate technology, and implement mitigation measures.
- Treaties and Alliances Between Nations – Create a system of international cooperation to harmonize laws and programs.
- Build a Safety-Focused Technical Culture with Open Failures – A culture of sharing learning and failures to quickly disseminate means of addressing them.
- Popular Movements Decide on Priorities and Drive Containment – All of this needs public input at every level, including to put pressure on each component and make it accountable.
- Ensure Coherence – Ensure that each element works in harmony with the others, that containment is a virtuous circle of mutually reinforcing measures.
Openness is not compatible with containment: “Some measure of anti-proliferation is necessary. And yes, let’s not shy away from the facts; that means real censorship, possibly well beyond national borders. There are times when this will be seen—perhaps rightly—as unbridled U.S. hegemony, Western arrogance, and selfishness. Quite honestly, I’m not always sure where the right balance is, but I now firmly believe that complete openness will push humanity off the narrow path."