Sam Hammond on getting government ready for AI

Sam Hammond is senior economist at the Foundation for American Innovation, a right-leaning tech policy think tank based in Washington DC. Hammond is a Trump supporter who expects AI to improve rapidly in the next few years, and he believes that will have profound implications for the public policy. In this interview, Hammond explains how he’d like to see the Trump administration tackle the new policy challenges he expects AI to create over the next four years.

Here are some of the key points Hammond made during the conversation:

* Rapid progress in verifiable domains: In areas with clear verifiers, like math, chemistry, or coding, AI will see rapid progress and be essentially solved in the short term. "For any kind of subdomain that you can construct a verifier for, there'll be very rapid progress."

* Slower progress on open-ended problems: Progress in open-ended areas, where verification is harder, will be more challenging, and there’s a need for reinforcement learning to be applied to improve autonomous abilities. "I think we're just scratching the surface of applying reinforcement learning techniques into these models."

* The democratization of AI: As AI capabilities become widely accessible, institutions will face unprecedented challenges. With open-source tools and AI agents in the hands of individuals, the volume and complexity of economic and social activity will grow exponentially. "When capabilities get demonstrated, we should start to brace for impact for those capabilities to be widely distributed."

* The risk of societal overload: If institutions fail to adapt, AI could overwhelm core functions such as tax collection, regulatory enforcement, and legal systems. The resulting systemic failure could undermine government effectiveness and societal stability. "Core functions of government could simply become overwhelmed by the pace of change."

* The need for deregulation: Deregulating and streamlining government processes are necessary to adapt institutions to the rapid changes brought by AI. Traditional regulatory frameworks are incompatible with the pace and scale of AI’s impact. "We need a kind of regulatory jubilee. Removing a regulation takes as much time as it does to add a regulation."

* Securing models and labs: There needs to be a deeper focus on securing AI models and increasing security in AI labs, especially as capabilities become tempting targets for other nations. "As we get closer to these kind of capabilities, they're going to be very tempting for other nation state actors to try to steal. And right now the labs are more or less wide open."

* The need for export controls and better security: To maintain a technological edge, tighter export controls and advanced monitoring systems are required to prevent adversaries from acquiring sensitive technologies and resources. Investments in technology for secure supply chain management are critical. "Anything that can deny or delay the development of China’s ecosystem is imperative."

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