I’m somehow wanting to clarify the difference between a “bridging heuristic” and solving a bucket error. If a person is to be able to hope for “an AI pause” and “not totalitarianism” at the same time (like cousin_it), they aren’t making a bucket error.
But, they/we might still not know how to try to harness social energy toward “an AI pause” without harnessing social energy toward “let any government that says it’s pro-pause, move toward totalitarianism with AI safety as fig leaf”.
The bridging heuristic I’d want would somehow involve built-in delimiters, so that if a if a social coalition gathered momentum behind the heuristic, the coalition wouldn’t be exploitable—its members would know what lines, if crossed, meant that the people who had co-opted the name of the coalition were no longer fighting for the coalition’s real values.
Like, if a good free speech organization backs Alice’s legal right to say [really dumb/offensive thing], the organization manages to keep track that it’s deal is “defend anybody’s legal right to say anything”, rather than “build coalition for [really dumb/offensive thing]”; it doesn’t get confused and switch to supporting [really dumb/offensive thing]. Adequate ethical heuristics around [good thing X, eg AI safety] would let us build social momentum toward [X] without it getting co-opted by [bad things that try to say they’re X].
I’m somehow wanting to clarify the difference between a “bridging heuristic” and solving a bucket error. If a person is to be able to hope for “an AI pause” and “not totalitarianism” at the same time (like cousin_it), they aren’t making a bucket error.
But, they/we might still not know how to try to harness social energy toward “an AI pause” without harnessing social energy toward “let any government that says it’s pro-pause, move toward totalitarianism with AI safety as fig leaf”.
The bridging heuristic I’d want would somehow involve built-in delimiters, so that if a if a social coalition gathered momentum behind the heuristic, the coalition wouldn’t be exploitable—its members would know what lines, if crossed, meant that the people who had co-opted the name of the coalition were no longer fighting for the coalition’s real values.
Like, if a good free speech organization backs Alice’s legal right to say [really dumb/offensive thing], the organization manages to keep track that it’s deal is “defend anybody’s legal right to say anything”, rather than “build coalition for [really dumb/offensive thing]”; it doesn’t get confused and switch to supporting [really dumb/offensive thing]. Adequate ethical heuristics around [good thing X, eg AI safety] would let us build social momentum toward [X] without it getting co-opted by [bad things that try to say they’re X].