(I disagree. Indeed, until recently governance people had very few policy asks for government.)
Did that change because people finally finished doing enough basic strategy research to know what policies to ask for?
Yeah, that’s Luke Muehlhauser’s claim; see the first paragraph of the linked piece.
I mostly agree with him. I wasn’t doing AI governance years ago but my impression is they didn’t have many/good policy asks. I’d be interested in counterevidence — like pre-2022 (collections of) good policy asks.
Anecdotally, I think I know one AI safety person who was doing influence-seeking-in-government and was on a good track but quit (to do research) because they weren’t able to leverage their influence because the AI governance community didn’t really have asks for (the US federal) government.
My own model differs a bit from Zach’s. It seems to me like most of the publicly-available policy proposals have not gotten much more concrete. It feels a lot more like people were motivated to share existing thoughts, as opposed to people having new thoughts or having more concrete thoughts.
Luke’s list, for example, is more of a “list of high-level ideas” than a “list of concrete policy proposals.” It has things like “licensing” and “information security requirements”– it’s not an actual bill or set of requirements. (And to be clear, I still like Luke’s post and it’s clear that he wasn’t trying to be super concrete).
I’d be excited for people to take policy ideas and concretize them further.
Aside: When I say “concrete” in this context, I don’t quite mean “people on LW would think this is specific.” I mean “this is closer to bill text, text of a section of an executive order, text of an amendment to a bill, text of an international treaty, etc.”
I think there are a lot of reasons why we haven’t seen much “concrete policy stuff”. Here are a few:
This work is just very difficult– it’s much easier to hide behind vagueness when you’re writing an academic-style paper than when you’re writing a concrete policy proposal.
This work requires people to express themselves with more certainty/concreteness than academic-style research. In a paper, you can avoid giving concrete recommendations, or you can give a recommendation and then immediately mention 3-5 crucial considerations that could change the calculus. In bills, you basically just say “here is what’s going to happen” and do much less “and here are the assumptions that go into this and a bunch of ways this could be wrong.”
This work forces people to engage with questions that are less “intellectually interesting” to many people (e.g., which government agency should be tasked with X, how exactly are we going to operationalize Y?)
This work just has a different “vibe” to the more LW-style research and the more academic-style research. Insofar as LW readers are selected for (and reinforced for) liking a certain “kind” of thinking/writing, this “kind” of thinking/writing is different than the concrete policy vibe in a bunch of hard-to-articulate ways.
This work often has the potential to be more consequential than academic-style research. There are clear downsides of developing [and advocating for] concrete policies that are bad. Without any gatekeeping, you might have a bunch of newbies writing flawed bills. With excessive gatekeeping, you might create a culture that disincentivizes intelligent people from writing good bills. (And my own subjective impression is that the community erred too far on the latter side, but I think reasonable people could disagree here).
For people interested in developing the kinds of proposals I’m talking about, I’d be happy to chat. I’m aware of a couple of groups doing the kind of policy thinking that I would consider “concrete”, and it’s quite plausible that we’ll see more groups shift toward this over time.
Yeah, that’s Luke Muehlhauser’s claim; see the first paragraph of the linked piece.
I mostly agree with him. I wasn’t doing AI governance years ago but my impression is they didn’t have many/good policy asks. I’d be interested in counterevidence — like pre-2022 (collections of) good policy asks.
Anecdotally, I think I know one AI safety person who was doing influence-seeking-in-government and was on a good track but quit (to do research) because they weren’t able to leverage their influence because the AI governance community didn’t really have asks for (the US federal) government.
My own model differs a bit from Zach’s. It seems to me like most of the publicly-available policy proposals have not gotten much more concrete. It feels a lot more like people were motivated to share existing thoughts, as opposed to people having new thoughts or having more concrete thoughts.
Luke’s list, for example, is more of a “list of high-level ideas” than a “list of concrete policy proposals.” It has things like “licensing” and “information security requirements”– it’s not an actual bill or set of requirements. (And to be clear, I still like Luke’s post and it’s clear that he wasn’t trying to be super concrete).
I’d be excited for people to take policy ideas and concretize them further.
Aside: When I say “concrete” in this context, I don’t quite mean “people on LW would think this is specific.” I mean “this is closer to bill text, text of a section of an executive order, text of an amendment to a bill, text of an international treaty, etc.”
I think there are a lot of reasons why we haven’t seen much “concrete policy stuff”. Here are a few:
This work is just very difficult– it’s much easier to hide behind vagueness when you’re writing an academic-style paper than when you’re writing a concrete policy proposal.
This work requires people to express themselves with more certainty/concreteness than academic-style research. In a paper, you can avoid giving concrete recommendations, or you can give a recommendation and then immediately mention 3-5 crucial considerations that could change the calculus. In bills, you basically just say “here is what’s going to happen” and do much less “and here are the assumptions that go into this and a bunch of ways this could be wrong.”
This work forces people to engage with questions that are less “intellectually interesting” to many people (e.g., which government agency should be tasked with X, how exactly are we going to operationalize Y?)
This work just has a different “vibe” to the more LW-style research and the more academic-style research. Insofar as LW readers are selected for (and reinforced for) liking a certain “kind” of thinking/writing, this “kind” of thinking/writing is different than the concrete policy vibe in a bunch of hard-to-articulate ways.
This work often has the potential to be more consequential than academic-style research. There are clear downsides of developing [and advocating for] concrete policies that are bad. Without any gatekeeping, you might have a bunch of newbies writing flawed bills. With excessive gatekeeping, you might create a culture that disincentivizes intelligent people from writing good bills. (And my own subjective impression is that the community erred too far on the latter side, but I think reasonable people could disagree here).
For people interested in developing the kinds of proposals I’m talking about, I’d be happy to chat. I’m aware of a couple of groups doing the kind of policy thinking that I would consider “concrete”, and it’s quite plausible that we’ll see more groups shift toward this over time.