If we successfully slow down the speed of AI development, but do not perform any ‘Science of Alignment’ in the meantime, what will we gain? Unless you think an outright global ban on superintelligence is tenable (we will need a global-catastrophe-level warning shot to generate the political will for this IMO, and even then hard for this hold durably), then we have to use the time wisely to advance alignment science.
A reasonable position might be that all prosaic alignment attempts are doomed, so we need to allocate our time / resources to non-prosaic alignment (eg ARC), which has next to zero dual use at the moment. I think that’s a reasonable opinion, but not what I want to bet all our marbles on.
If we successfully slow down the speed of AI development, but do not perform any ‘Science of Alignment’ in the meantime, what will we gain? Unless you think an outright global ban on superintelligence is tenable (we will need a global-catastrophe-level warning shot to generate the political will for this IMO, and even then hard for this hold durably), then we have to use the time wisely to advance alignment science.
A reasonable position might be that all prosaic alignment attempts are doomed, so we need to allocate our time / resources to non-prosaic alignment (eg ARC), which has next to zero dual use at the moment. I think that’s a reasonable opinion, but not what I want to bet all our marbles on.