I think this is true so long as the federal government/relevant states don’t have transparency into companies around incidents, but once they do, I think warning shots become much less useful, and therefore much more worthy of prevention, and a key update that I think is warranted based on the HF incident is that the value of warning shots is not to convince the public (which currently holds an extremely strong prior around AI not being too capable, and only updates minimally off of their limited evidence they think about), but to convince elites/decision makers in government to prioritize AI safety.
More generally, one update I’ve made from the HF incident is that most of what we need to get to existential security does not rest on the public being awake and alarmed, but rather elites in the labs and governments being awake and alarmed, and in particular good AI safety (and frankly other causes which I consider to be more worthy/better like better futures work) will largely avoid focusing on convincing the public.
Once we accept that “convincing the public” matters a lot less than people who currently work on AI governance think, it follows that we should prevent warning shots once we have government-backed transparency laws.
I think this is true so long as the federal government/relevant states don’t have transparency into companies around incidents, but once they do, I think warning shots become much less useful, and therefore much more worthy of prevention, and a key update that I think is warranted based on the HF incident is that the value of warning shots is not to convince the public (which currently holds an extremely strong prior around AI not being too capable, and only updates minimally off of their limited evidence they think about), but to convince elites/decision makers in government to prioritize AI safety.
More generally, one update I’ve made from the HF incident is that most of what we need to get to existential security does not rest on the public being awake and alarmed, but rather elites in the labs and governments being awake and alarmed, and in particular good AI safety (and frankly other causes which I consider to be more worthy/better like better futures work) will largely avoid focusing on convincing the public.
Once we accept that “convincing the public” matters a lot less than people who currently work on AI governance think, it follows that we should prevent warning shots once we have government-backed transparency laws.