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Faster scientific progress makes it harder for governance to keep pace with development

A Survey of the Potential Long-term Impacts of AI: How AI Could Lead to Long-term Changes in Science, Cooperation, Power, Epistemics and Values

Sub-category
Risk Domain

Inadequate regulatory frameworks and oversight mechanisms that fail to keep pace with AI development, leading to ineffective governance and the inability to manage AI risks appropriately.

"Exacerbating these problems is that faster scientific progress would make it even harder for governance to keep pace with the deployment of new technologies. When these technologies are especially powerful or dangerous, such as those discussed above, insufficient governance can magnify their harms.8 This is known as the pacing problem, and it is an issue that technology governance already faces [47], for a variety of reasons"(p. 3)

Supporting Evidence (1)

1.
"• Information asymmetries between the developers of new technologies and those governing them, leading to insufficient or misguided governance. • Tech companies are often just better resourced than governments, especially because they can afford to pay much higher salaries and so attract top talent. • Technology interest groups often lobby to preserve aspects of the status quo that are benefiting them (e.g., subsidies, tax loopholes, protective trade measures), making policy change—and especially experimental policies—difficult and slow to implement [56]. • For governance to keep pace with technological progress, this tends to require anticipating the impacts of technology in advance, before shaping them becomes expensive, difficult"(p. 3)

Other risks from Clarke2023 (19)