The focus of the piece is on the cost of various methods taken to slow down AI timelines, with the thesis being that across a wide variety of different beliefs about the merit of slowing down AI, these costs aren’t worth it. I don’t think it’s confused to be agnostic about the merits of slowing down AI when the tradeoffs being taken are this bad.
Views on the merit of slowing down AI will be highly variable from person to person and will depend on a lot of extremely difficult and debatable premises that are nevertheless easy to have an opinion on. There is a place for debating all of those various premises and trying to nail down what exactly the benefit is of slowing down AI; but there is also a place for saying “hey, stop getting pulled in by that bike-shed and notice how these tradeoffs being taken are not worth it given pretty much any view on the benefit of slowing down AI”.
> I think you’re confused about the perspective that you’re trying to argue against. Lots of people are very confident, including “when pressed”, that we’d probably be in a much better place right now if the big AGI labs (especially OpenAI) had never been founded. You can disagree, but you shouldn’t put words in people’s mouths.
I was speaking from experience, having seen this dynamic play out multiple times. But yes, I’m aware that others are extremely confident in all kinds of specific and shaky premises.
The focus of the piece is on the cost of various methods taken to slow down AI timelines, with the thesis being that across a wide variety of different beliefs about the merit of slowing down AI, these costs aren’t worth it. I don’t think it’s confused to be agnostic about the merits of slowing down AI when the tradeoffs being taken are this bad.
Views on the merit of slowing down AI will be highly variable from person to person and will depend on a lot of extremely difficult and debatable premises that are nevertheless easy to have an opinion on. There is a place for debating all of those various premises and trying to nail down what exactly the benefit is of slowing down AI; but there is also a place for saying “hey, stop getting pulled in by that bike-shed and notice how these tradeoffs being taken are not worth it given pretty much any view on the benefit of slowing down AI”.
> I think you’re confused about the perspective that you’re trying to argue against. Lots of people are very confident, including “when pressed”, that we’d probably be in a much better place right now if the big AGI labs (especially OpenAI) had never been founded. You can disagree, but you shouldn’t put words in people’s mouths.
I was speaking from experience, having seen this dynamic play out multiple times. But yes, I’m aware that others are extremely confident in all kinds of specific and shaky premises.