The rapid advance of artificial intelligence (AI) has simultaneously raised concerns that the technology might result in significant harms and raised hopes that its contributions across different industries and applications could produce major economic benefits. Both the U.S. government and the private sector have made significant investments in pursuit of these benefits, and there have been calls for similarly significant investments that are focused on reducing the potential for AI-caused risks, including potentially catastrophic risks.
In this report, the authors take on the question of how to think about a big bet on research and development (R&D) that is focused on AI trustworthiness, safety, and security: a $10 billion U.S. government investment. Policy debate about such large investments is often dominated by the assumptions that decisionmakers or others have going in—that is, whether they already think that AI is fundamentally unsafe or whether such investments would help or hurt national competitiveness. The authors take a different approach to the question by applying break-even analysis to consider how potential benefits, costs, and trade-offs might play out using a variety of defensible approximations for different factors. Rather than requiring agreement on contentious questions, such as the probability of AI catastrophe, the analysis explores how different beliefs about risk and benefit interact to affect whether such an investment would pay off.
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