My best understanding of your position is: “Sure, but they will be trying really hard. So additional researchers working on the problem won’t much change their probability of success, and you should instead work on more-neglected problems.”
That is not my position if “you” in the story is “you, Paul Christiano” :) The closest position I have to that one is : “If another Paul comes along who cares about x-risk, they’ll have more positive impact by focusing on multi-agent and multi-stakeholder issues or ‘ethics’ with AI tech than if they focus on intent alignment, because multi-agent and multi-stakeholder dynamics will greatly affect what strategies AI stakeholders ‘want’ their AI systems to pursue.”
If they tried to get you to quit working on alignment, I’d say “No, the tech companies still need people working on alignment for them, and Paul is/was one of those people. I don’t endorse converting existing alignment researchers to working on multi/multi delegation theory (unless they’re naturally interested in it), but if a marginal AI-capabilities-bound researcher comes along, I endorse getting them set up to think about multi/multi delegation more than alignment.”
That is not my position if “you” in the story is “you, Paul Christiano” :) The closest position I have to that one is : “If another Paul comes along who cares about x-risk, they’ll have more positive impact by focusing on multi-agent and multi-stakeholder issues or ‘ethics’ with AI tech than if they focus on intent alignment, because multi-agent and multi-stakeholder dynamics will greatly affect what strategies AI stakeholders ‘want’ their AI systems to pursue.”
If they tried to get you to quit working on alignment, I’d say “No, the tech companies still need people working on alignment for them, and Paul is/was one of those people. I don’t endorse converting existing alignment researchers to working on multi/multi delegation theory (unless they’re naturally interested in it), but if a marginal AI-capabilities-bound researcher comes along, I endorse getting them set up to think about multi/multi delegation more than alignment.”