As someone who spends a significant part of his time briefing policymakers in Europe, ministerial advisors, senior civil servants in AI governance, I want to point out something obvious from where I stand, but absent from this discussion.
The “radical transparency vs. strategic communication” debate presupposes that framing is the bottleneck. It isn’t. The bottleneck is volume. Most policymakers have never heard the argument, no matter how you frame it. Among the ones I interact with, maybe 2% have been exposed to the problem enough to have an opinion. Another 10% or so have heard something, but mostly through the Yann LeCun-adjacent dismissals, and formed their view from that. The remaining ~88%, including people in very important AI governance positions, have simply never had the conversation.
The question of which approach works better is real but secondary. What’s missing is more people doing this work at all. It’s a campaign, and the limiting factor is coverage, not the message.
To give a concrete data point: the only policymaker in my circles who has ever brought up “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies” is Lord Tim Clement-Jones, chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on AI in the UK. And he was probably already sympathetic. That’s one person.
As someone who spends a significant part of his time briefing policymakers in Europe, ministerial advisors, senior civil servants in AI governance, I want to point out something obvious from where I stand, but absent from this discussion.
The “radical transparency vs. strategic communication” debate presupposes that framing is the bottleneck. It isn’t. The bottleneck is volume. Most policymakers have never heard the argument, no matter how you frame it. Among the ones I interact with, maybe 2% have been exposed to the problem enough to have an opinion. Another 10% or so have heard something, but mostly through the Yann LeCun-adjacent dismissals, and formed their view from that. The remaining ~88%, including people in very important AI governance positions, have simply never had the conversation.
The question of which approach works better is real but secondary. What’s missing is more people doing this work at all. It’s a campaign, and the limiting factor is coverage, not the message.
To give a concrete data point: the only policymaker in my circles who has ever brought up “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies” is Lord Tim Clement-Jones, chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on AI in the UK. And he was probably already sympathetic. That’s one person.