Maybe I should clarify my view a bit on Plan A vs “shut it all down”:
Both seem really hard to pull off from a political will and actually making it happen.
Plan A is complicated and looking at I go “oh jeez, this seems really hard to make happen well, idk if the US government has the institutional capacity to pull off something like this”. But, I also think pulling off “shut it all down” seems pretty rough and pulling off a shutdown that lasts for a really long time seems hard.
Generally, it seems like Plan A might be hard to pull off and it’s easy for me to imagine it going wrong. This also mostly applies to “shut it all down” though.
I still think Plan A is better than other options and Plan A going poorly can still nicely degrade into Plan B (or C).
It generally looks to me like Plan A is strictly better on most axes, though maybe “shut it all down” would be better if we were very confident in maintaining extremely high political will (e.g. at or above peak WW2 level political will) for a very long time.
There would still be a question of whether the reduction in risk is worth delaying the benefits of AI. I tenatively think yes even from a normal moral perspective, but this isn’t as clear of a call as doing something like Plan A.
I worry about changes in the balance of power between the US and China with this long of a pause (and general geopolitical drift making the situation worse and destabilizing this plan). But, maybe if you actually had the political will you could make a deal which handles this somehow? Not sure exactly how, minimally the US could try to get its shit together more in terms of economic growth.
And I’d be a bit worried about indefinite pause but not that worried.
This is my view after more seriously getting into some of the details of the Plan A related to compute verification and avoiding blacksite projects as well as trying to do a more precise comparison with “shut it all down”.
Maybe I should clarify my view a bit on Plan A vs “shut it all down”:
Both seem really hard to pull off from a political will and actually making it happen.
Plan A is complicated and looking at I go “oh jeez, this seems really hard to make happen well, idk if the US government has the institutional capacity to pull off something like this”. But, I also think pulling off “shut it all down” seems pretty rough and pulling off a shutdown that lasts for a really long time seems hard.
Generally, it seems like Plan A might be hard to pull off and it’s easy for me to imagine it going wrong. This also mostly applies to “shut it all down” though.
I still think Plan A is better than other options and Plan A going poorly can still nicely degrade into Plan B (or C).
It generally looks to me like Plan A is strictly better on most axes, though maybe “shut it all down” would be better if we were very confident in maintaining extremely high political will (e.g. at or above peak WW2 level political will) for a very long time.
There would still be a question of whether the reduction in risk is worth delaying the benefits of AI. I tenatively think yes even from a normal moral perspective, but this isn’t as clear of a call as doing something like Plan A.
I worry about changes in the balance of power between the US and China with this long of a pause (and general geopolitical drift making the situation worse and destabilizing this plan). But, maybe if you actually had the political will you could make a deal which handles this somehow? Not sure exactly how, minimally the US could try to get its shit together more in terms of economic growth.
And I’d be a bit worried about indefinite pause but not that worried.
This is my view after more seriously getting into some of the details of the Plan A related to compute verification and avoiding blacksite projects as well as trying to do a more precise comparison with “shut it all down”.