I think we should be careful not to overestimate the success of AI2027. “Vance has engaged with your work” is an impressive feat, but it’s still relatively far away from something like “Vance and others in the Admin have taken your work seriously enough to start to meaningfully change their actions or priorities based on it.” (That bar is very high, but my impression is that the AI2027 folks would be like “yea, that’s what would need to happen in order to steer toward meaningfully better futures.”)
My impression is that AI2027 will have (even) more success if it is accompanied by an ambitious policymaker outreach effort (e.g., lots of 1-1 meetings with relevant policymakers and staffers, writing specific pieces of legislation or EOs and forming a coalition around those ideas, publishing short FAQ memos that address misconceptions or objections they are hearing in their meetings with policymakers, etc.)
This isn’t to say that research is unnecessary—much of the success of AI2027 comes from Daniel (and others on the team) having dedicated much of their lives to research and deep understanding. There are plenty of Government Relations people who are decent at “general policy engagement” but will fail to provide useful answers when staffers ask things like “But why won’t we just code in the goals we want?”, or “But don’t you think the real thing here is about how quickly we diffuse the technology?”, or “Why don’t you think existing laws will work to prevent this?” or a whole host of other questions.
But on the margin, I would probably have Daniel/AI2027 spend more time on policymaker outreach and less time on additional research (especially now that AI2027 is done). There is some degree of influence one can have with the “write something that is thoroughly researched and hope it spreads organically” effort, and I think AI2027 has essentially saturated that. For additional influence, I expect it will be useful for Daniel (or other competent communicators on his team) to advance to “get really good at having meetings with the ~100-1000 most important people, understanding their worldviews, going back and forth with them, understanding their ideological or political constraints, and finding solutions/ideas/arguments that are tailored to these particular individuals.” This is still a very intellectual task in some ways, but it involves a lot more “having meetings” and “forming models of social/political reality” than the classic “sit in your room with a whiteboard and understand technical reality” stuff that we typically associate with research.
I think we should be careful not to overestimate the success of AI2027. “Vance has engaged with your work” is an impressive feat, but it’s still relatively far away from something like “Vance and others in the Admin have taken your work seriously enough to start to meaningfully change their actions or priorities based on it.” (That bar is very high, but my impression is that the AI2027 folks would be like “yea, that’s what would need to happen in order to steer toward meaningfully better futures.”)
My impression is that AI2027 will have (even) more success if it is accompanied by an ambitious policymaker outreach effort (e.g., lots of 1-1 meetings with relevant policymakers and staffers, writing specific pieces of legislation or EOs and forming a coalition around those ideas, publishing short FAQ memos that address misconceptions or objections they are hearing in their meetings with policymakers, etc.)
This isn’t to say that research is unnecessary—much of the success of AI2027 comes from Daniel (and others on the team) having dedicated much of their lives to research and deep understanding. There are plenty of Government Relations people who are decent at “general policy engagement” but will fail to provide useful answers when staffers ask things like “But why won’t we just code in the goals we want?”, or “But don’t you think the real thing here is about how quickly we diffuse the technology?”, or “Why don’t you think existing laws will work to prevent this?” or a whole host of other questions.
But on the margin, I would probably have Daniel/AI2027 spend more time on policymaker outreach and less time on additional research (especially now that AI2027 is done). There is some degree of influence one can have with the “write something that is thoroughly researched and hope it spreads organically” effort, and I think AI2027 has essentially saturated that. For additional influence, I expect it will be useful for Daniel (or other competent communicators on his team) to advance to “get really good at having meetings with the ~100-1000 most important people, understanding their worldviews, going back and forth with them, understanding their ideological or political constraints, and finding solutions/ideas/arguments that are tailored to these particular individuals.” This is still a very intellectual task in some ways, but it involves a lot more “having meetings” and “forming models of social/political reality” than the classic “sit in your room with a whiteboard and understand technical reality” stuff that we typically associate with research.