There are zero laws against the design, manufacture, sale, or possession of cars with spinning blades and/or flamethrowers.

Such laws attach to the human operators of such cars, if they recklessly endanger others by driving them on shared, public roads.

But they're perfectly legal to own (and operate off-road). And, there's no technical barrier stopping people from illegally driving them on public roads: just fear of laws.

(There's entire subcultures of people who modify cars to do insanely dangerous things, on private race tracks. Perfectly legal).

If we were to apply Amodei's safety standard to cars—do they have the theoretical risk of killing over 50 people—well, cars empirically kill tens of thousands of people in the US annually, so we'd have to categorically ban them. That standard is bad-faith and absurd.

Yet we don't regulate computers so that they're rendered incapable of running software that can be used to hack into systems. Or said software, by the way. All we do is punish the people who use these tools to cause harm to others.

AI is much more comparable to that than to a car.

That assumes AI is designed to be malicious, "the spinning blades". AI is not; the public version given to you is the sanded down one, in the same way that cars don't have spinning blades but can still be dangerous when misused.

If a person closes his eyes and hits the gas pedal on the car and runs over someone, the person is to blame, not the car. AI companies do the same. Your eyes may be closed but you're still operating/hosting the car/AI.

If your AI model develops the capability to manifest itself in the physical world as spinning blades and flamethrowers I'm fully open to re-evaluating the need for regulation.

Until then, I propose we use the 'unplug the server' rule. Can [insert bad thing] be prevented by unplugging the server? Then these things are fully in our control and no, we don't need to re-build hundreds of years of legal precedent from the ground up.

Liability in the event of harm is already something we have a pretty good handle on from living through the industrial revolution 150 years ago, a time when much more activity that companies did existed in the real world with real harms, as opposed to digital companies doing imagined "mental" harm to soft desk chair people who work at email jobs.