I’m struck by how many of your cruxes seem like things that it would actually just be in the hands of the international governing body to control. My guess is, if DARPA has a team of safety researchers, and they go to the international body, and they’re like ‘we’re blocked by this set of experiments* that takes a large amount of compute; can we please have more compute?’, and then the international body gets some panel of independent researchers to confirm that this is true, and the only solution is more compute for that particular group of researchers, they commission a datacenter or something so that the research can continue.
Like, it seems obviously true to me that people (especially in government/military) will continue working on the problem at all, and that access to larger amounts of resources for doing that work is a matter of petitioning the body. It feels like your plan is built around facilitating this kind of carveout, and the MIRI plan is built around treating it as the exception that it is (and prioritizing gaining some centralized control over AI as a field over guaranteeing to-me-implausible rapid progress toward the best possible outcomes).
*which maybe is ‘building automated alignment researchers’, but better specified and less terrifying
I’m struck by how many of your cruxes seem like things that it would actually just be in the hands of the international governing body to control. My guess is, if DARPA has a team of safety researchers, and they go to the international body, and they’re like ‘we’re blocked by this set of experiments* that takes a large amount of compute; can we please have more compute?’, and then the international body gets some panel of independent researchers to confirm that this is true, and the only solution is more compute for that particular group of researchers, they commission a datacenter or something so that the research can continue.
Like, it seems obviously true to me that people (especially in government/military) will continue working on the problem at all, and that access to larger amounts of resources for doing that work is a matter of petitioning the body. It feels like your plan is built around facilitating this kind of carveout, and the MIRI plan is built around treating it as the exception that it is (and prioritizing gaining some centralized control over AI as a field over guaranteeing to-me-implausible rapid progress toward the best possible outcomes).
*which maybe is ‘building automated alignment researchers’, but better specified and less terrifying