AI summit, semiconductor trade policy, and a green light for alternative proteins

What British politics meant for EA in July and August 2023

Early November is the date for the UK’s summit on AI safety, according to leaks yesterday. Offers have been sent out for new AI Civil Service roles. British politics seems increasingly important to the AI safety world.

Ezra Klein recently criticised the AI safety community for failing to engage with policymakers. This critique might hold less in the UK than the US; San Francisco and DC are time zones apart, but DeepMind is just a Tube ride from Whitehall. Even so, effective altruists might benefit from somebody reading British news from an EA point-of-view.

This is my attempt to justify the ways of Westminster to EA, and EA to Westminster. I’m spotlighting recent headlines on the AI summit, semiconductor trade policy, and alternative proteins.

The summit

Rishi Sunak announced his ‘sherpas’ for the AI summit. Matt Clifford and Jonathan Black will represent Downing Street at the international summit.

Clifford is CEO of Entrepreneur First and Chair of the Advanced Research and Invention Agency. He spoke about AI at EAG London 2023, and was blogging about AI and science policy until December 2022. Black, who is a Heywood Fellow at Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government (but not the FT careers advice columnist of the same name), brings diplomatic experience as former G7 and G20 Sherpa and Deputy National Security Adviser.

For people worried about existential risk, these seem like good picks. Clifford has said the chances of human extinction from AI are “non-zero”.

Attention is turning to the summit guest list. David Cameron was known as the ‘essay crisis’ Prime Minister for his penchant to procrastinate. Rishi Sunak might be cultivating a similar reputation. Politico reports that Sunak’s AI summit is due early November, but that “the guest list hasn’t been finalized, key details are yet to be announced and western allies are unclear about how it fits with existing work on setting global rules”.

Basically, summit organisation all seems “a bit last minute and messy”, as a European Parliament official told Politico.

The big question mark for the guest list is China. Yoichi Iida (director of policy for Japan’s Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications) says it is “too early” to invite China. But MPs and think tanks like Chatham House are encouraging Sunak to bring China onboard.

Tobias Ellwood, chair of the Commons defence committee, and Alicia Kearns, chair of the Commons foreign affairs committee, have publicly urged Sunak to invite China. Comparing AI to nuclear power, Ellwood said we need “total buy-in” because the “threat won’t be contained by geographical borders”. Kearns said we need to understand Chinese AI capabilities and “agree global standards”.

Ellwood and Kearns are both Conservatives, but as select committee chairs they are responsible for examining the government’s record and have their own base of power. (Ellwood, who recently made and apologised for comments that looked past the Taliban’s misogynistic, antidemocratic politics, faces a confidence vote and may not be select committee chair for long.)

Many Tory MPs take a firm anti-China stance, condemning the one China policy and/or the Uyghur genocide. Sunak isn’t seen as an especially strong China hawk; he was previously criticised for softening the government’s stance towards China, calling it a “systemic challenge” but not an official “threat”.

Inviting China to events has caused diplomatic and party political headaches for PMs before: senior Tory MPs criticised an invitation for President Xi Jinping to attend the Queen’s funeral. (Jinping didn’t attend, and the Chinese diplomatic entourage were barred from viewing the Queen’s coffin on Parliamentary grounds by Speaker Lindsay Hoyle, reflecting disagreement between government and Parliament).

The economy and semiconductors

The Deputy Prime Minister said AI could have a bigger impact than the Industrial Revolution in an interview with The Times (paywalled). Conservative Oliver Dowden, whose responsibilities include long-term resilience, said “It’s going to totally transform almost all elements of life over the coming years, and indeed, even months, in some cases. It is much faster than other revolutions that we’ve seen and much more extensive.”

He’s probably not read the Yudkowsky – Hanson FOOM debate, but he knows AI is going to make things weird, fast. It’s good to have policymakers with that perspective, rather than getting stuck into short-term AI ethics vs long-term AI safety debates. As Jan Brauner and Alan Chan argued in TIME, that’s a “false dichotomy” as “ongoing harms and emergent risks” actually share “common root causes”.

Dowden’s Cabinet Office published the annually updated National Risk Register this month. AI was recognised as one of the “chronic risks” facing the UK: “continuous challenges that erode our economy, community, way of life, and/or national security.”

It’s worth watching Angela Rayner, Dowden’s opposite number. She received an in-depth profile in the Guardian last month. Rayner hasn’t made many (any?) public statements on AI, but her portfolio includes the Future of Work: “It’s about society having minimum standards that we expect: to be safe at work, to have a contract of employment that tells you what your work is, and to not have to worry about being sacked the next day just because they can find someone who’ll do the work a lot cheaper than you”.

As AI puts more and more jobs at risk, you can imagine her concerns expanding to include some algorithm that can do the work cheaper and faster. Relatedly: The Institute for the Future of Work are producing relevant, AI-savvy policy reports; the Guardian asks “Will AI steal my job?” in its Future of Work latest; and a new research briefing from the House of Commons Library on “Artificial intelligence and employment law” just dropped.

Spotlight on semiconductor industry. Following an executive order from Joe Biden restricting American investment in the Chinese tech sector, including AI and quantum computing, the FT report that “Sunak is weighing whether to follow” (paywalled). The government said they “continue to assess potential national security risks attached to some investments”.

Biden’s move attracted criticism in Unherd, where Marshall Auerback writes “there could be serious consequences for the entire global economy”, and The Economist, who say his “China strategy is not working” (paywalled). Meanwhile, journos are considering the strength of the UK’s semiconductor industry; I recommend a deep dive from the Guardian’s economics correspondent Richard Partington. What’s the takeaway? In May, the UK pledged £1bn over the next decade to chip companies; America’s CHIPS Act promised $52bn (£41bn) in subsidies. Tech minister Paul Scully now says Britain can’t “recreate Taiwan in South Wales” (paywalled). Probably true.

A summit invite? A trade war? China looms over AI news. The most insightful commentary on Chinese AI ambitions I’ve read this month is from Jordan Schneider’s blog: AI Competition: China’s Strategy, Biden’s Wavering Response, and the Implications for AI Safety. Guest blogger Greg Allen has insights on Washington’s mixed feelings about semiconductor protectionism.

And alternative proteins

Moving on from AI, alternative proteins are in British headlines again! Yay: animal welfare news!

The Good: Israeli lab-grown meat startup Aleph Farms has applied for permission to sell its products in the UK. Bloomberg has the scoop (paywalled).

Seth Roberts of The Good Food Institute, said: “It’s great news that the UK has received its first application to sell cultivated meat. Once approved by regulators, British consumers will be able to enjoy their favourite beef dishes, made in a way that could slash climate emissions and create space for more sustainable farming.”

As well as environmentalists, alternative proteins are welcomed by animal advocates because they could substitute for goods which cause incredible suffering in factory farms.

Aleph Farms’s application is being processed by the Food Standards Agency. The FSA currently follows procedures for evaluating novel foods which were established by the EU, but this is up for a post-Brexit review at some point soon. The process can take up to 18 months, so we might see cultivated beef in 2025.

The environmental benefits of alternative proteins raise the possibility of funding under Labour’s ‘green transition’ budget, designed to imitate Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and originally slated at £28bn/year but since downgraded due to economic circumstances. IRA funding for sustainable agriculture has received criticism from environmental advocates for focusing on unproven strategies to produce climate-smart beef and from animal advocates for failing to fully reckon with the meat industry’s role in the climate crisis.

After the Tories made ULEZ into a by-election issue and Sunak pledged to “max out” oil drilling, some commentators have speculated that the UK might be edging towards US-style culture wars with the Conservatives blocking sustainability policies. Polling suggests 73% of Conservative voters support reaching net zero by 2050, but only 17% support green policies that result in some additional costs for ordinary people. Alternative proteins advocates say lab-grown meat will be indistinguishable from slaughter meat so support could be an attractive environmental policy for the Tories.

Also: The Economist introduce us to companies using precision fermentation to create alternative cheeses.

The Bad: Many outlets are calling time for the plant-based “fad” after Beyond Meat reported its net revenues had fallen by 30.5% for the three months to the end of June, relative to a year earlier. Shares fell by 12% during extending trading in New York.

The company now expects an annual revenue of between $360m to $380m, down from earlier estimates of as much as $415m. Ethan Brown, founder and CEO, said of the plant-based market: “The overall pie is not growing and that’s what we need to fix together with other companies”.

Commentary in the British press includes “Fake meat: As Beyond Meat sales fall, have we had our fill?” from the BBC, the opinion piece “Fair-weather vegans should remember it’s a diet, not a fad” from Barbara Ellen for the Observer/Guardian, and an interview with Jacob Rees-Mogg on GB News.

My penny’s worth: reports of the death of plant-based meat are exaggerated. It’s a mistake to treat Beyond Meat as a bellwether for the whole industry when there are more plant-based products, including supermarket own-brand, out there. And lab-grown meat might be better liked yet.

But neither should animal advocates ignore evidence that plant-based buyers say they are moving away because the products are highly processed, or evidence that price, taste and convenience parity might not be enough to sway current consumers (disclaimer: I worked on the linked report). More research is needed!

The Anecdotal: A food stall vendor in Camden tells me he sells 1 “3D-printed steak” to every 50 meat (dead animal) products. Huh.

Thanks for reading

I bet this is of interest too…

• Eliot Wilson blogs about risk tolerance in UK politicians and civil servants, arguing that – perhaps contrary to expectation – politicians are fundamentally risk takers

• The Economist profiles The Tony Blair Institute (paywalled), claiming they have strong influence over Keir Starmer’s Labour Party and are well-funded. A June Tony Blair Institute report said AI poses an “existential” risk because “inadequately aligned AI systems smarter than humans could seek [...] seizure of ultimate control”

• One for the global priorities researchers: The Economist reports “Western values are steadily diverging from the rest of the world’s” (paywalled)

• Pravina Rudra at The New Statesman tells us “What dating effective altruists taught me”.

Emergent capabilities: This month, I learnt AI can generate new research hypotheses, and identify wildlife at scale.

A newsworthy vegan: Ezra Klein! :)

London vegan restaurant rec: Facing Heaven does Sichuanese-inspired dishes in Hackney. It’s cool in a grungy way!