Fair enough. I think these actions are +ev under a coarse grained model where some version of “Attention on AI risk” is the main currency (or a slight refinement to “Not-totally-hostile attention on AI risk”). For a domain like public opinion and comms, I think that deploying a set of simple heuristics like “Am I getting attention?” “Is that attention generally positive?” “Am I lying or doing something illegal?” can be pretty useful.
Michael said on twitter here that he’s had conversations with two sympathetic DeepMind employees, plus David Silver, who was also vaguely sympathetic. This itself is more +ev than I expected already, so I’m updating in favour of Michael here.
It’s also occurred to me that if any of the CEOs cracks and at least publicly responds the hunger strikers, then the CEOs who don’t do so will look villainous, so you actually only need to have one of them respond to get a wedge in.
“Attention on AI risk” is a somewhat very bad proxy to optimize for, where available tactics include attention that would be paid to luddites, lunatics, and crackpots caring about some issue.
The actions that we can take can:
Use what separates us from people everyone considers crazy: that our arguments check out and our predictions hold; communicate those;
Spark and mobilize existing public support;
Be designed to optimize for positive attention, not for any attention.
I don’t think DeepMind employees really changed their minds? Like, there are people at DeepMind with p(doom) higher than Eliezer’s; they would be sympathetic; would they change anything they’re doing? (I can imagine it prompting them to talk to others at DeepMind, talking about the hunger strike to validate the reasons for it.)
I don’t think Demis responding to the strike would make Dario look particularly villainous, happy to make conditional bets. How villainous someone looks here should be pretty independent, outside of eg Demis responding, prompting a journalist to ask Dario, which takes plausible deniability away from him.
I’m also not sure how effective it would be to use this to paint the companies (or the CEOs—are they even the explicit targets of the hunger strikes?) as villainous.
Fair enough. I think these actions are +ev under a coarse grained model where some version of “Attention on AI risk” is the main currency (or a slight refinement to “Not-totally-hostile attention on AI risk”). For a domain like public opinion and comms, I think that deploying a set of simple heuristics like “Am I getting attention?” “Is that attention generally positive?” “Am I lying or doing something illegal?” can be pretty useful.
Michael said on twitter here that he’s had conversations with two sympathetic DeepMind employees, plus David Silver, who was also vaguely sympathetic. This itself is more +ev than I expected already, so I’m updating in favour of Michael here.
It’s also occurred to me that if any of the CEOs cracks and at least publicly responds the hunger strikers, then the CEOs who don’t do so will look villainous, so you actually only need to have one of them respond to get a wedge in.
“Attention on AI risk” is a somewhat very bad proxy to optimize for, where available tactics include attention that would be paid to luddites, lunatics, and crackpots caring about some issue.
The actions that we can take can:
Use what separates us from people everyone considers crazy: that our arguments check out and our predictions hold; communicate those;
Spark and mobilize existing public support;
Be designed to optimize for positive attention, not for any attention.
I don’t think DeepMind employees really changed their minds? Like, there are people at DeepMind with p(doom) higher than Eliezer’s; they would be sympathetic; would they change anything they’re doing? (I can imagine it prompting them to talk to others at DeepMind, talking about the hunger strike to validate the reasons for it.)
I don’t think Demis responding to the strike would make Dario look particularly villainous, happy to make conditional bets. How villainous someone looks here should be pretty independent, outside of eg Demis responding, prompting a journalist to ask Dario, which takes plausible deniability away from him.
I’m also not sure how effective it would be to use this to paint the companies (or the CEOs—are they even the explicit targets of the hunger strikes?) as villainous.