I expected your comment to be hyperbolic, but no. I mean sheesh:
In the decade that I have been working on AI, I’ve watched it grow from a tiny academic field to arguably the most important economic and geopolitical issue in the world. In all that time, perhaps the most important lesson I’ve learned is this: the progress of the underlying technology is inexorable, driven by forces too powerful to stop, but the way in which it happens—the order in which things are built, the applications we choose, and the details of how it is rolled out to society—are eminently possible to change, and it’s possible to have great positive impact by doing so. We can’t stop the bus, but we can steer it. In the past I’ve written about the importance of deploying AI in a way that is positive for the world and of ensuring that democracies build and wield the technology before autocracies do.
(Emphasis mine.) What rhetorical cleverness. This translates as: “I have expertise and foresightedness; here’s your Overton window.” Then he goes gears-level (ish) for a whole essay, reinscribing in the minds of Serious People the lethal assumptions laid out here: “We can’t slow down; if you knew what I knew you’d see the ‘forces’ that make this obvious, and besides do you want the commies to win?”
I’m not just doing polemic. I think the rhetorical strategy “dismissing pause and cooperation out of hand instead of arguing against them” tells us something. I’m not sure what, alas. I do think that labs’ arguments to the governments work best if they’ve already set the terms of the debate. It helps Dario’s efforts if “pause/cooperate” is something “all the serious people know” is not worth paying attention to.
I 80% think he also believes that pausing and cooperation are bad ideas (despite his obvious cognizance of the time-crunch). But I doubt he dismisses it so out-of-hand privately.
Ironically, arguably the most important/useful point of the essay is arguing for a rebranded version of the “precisely timed short slow/pause/pivot resources to safety” proposal. Dario’s rebranded it as spending down a “security buffer”.
(I don’t have a strong view on whether this is a good rebrand, seems reasonable to me I guess and the terminology seems roughly as good for communicating about this type of action.)
I expected your comment to be hyperbolic, but no. I mean sheesh:
(Emphasis mine.) What rhetorical cleverness. This translates as: “I have expertise and foresightedness; here’s your Overton window.” Then he goes gears-level (ish) for a whole essay, reinscribing in the minds of Serious People the lethal assumptions laid out here: “We can’t slow down; if you knew what I knew you’d see the ‘forces’ that make this obvious, and besides do you want the commies to win?”
I’m not just doing polemic. I think the rhetorical strategy “dismissing pause and cooperation out of hand instead of arguing against them” tells us something. I’m not sure what, alas. I do think that labs’ arguments to the governments work best if they’ve already set the terms of the debate. It helps Dario’s efforts if “pause/cooperate” is something “all the serious people know” is not worth paying attention to.
I 80% think he also believes that pausing and cooperation are bad ideas (despite his obvious cognizance of the time-crunch). But I doubt he dismisses it so out-of-hand privately.
Ironically, arguably the most important/useful point of the essay is arguing for a rebranded version of the “precisely timed short slow/pause/pivot resources to safety” proposal. Dario’s rebranded it as spending down a “security buffer”.
(I don’t have a strong view on whether this is a good rebrand, seems reasonable to me I guess and the terminology seems roughly as good for communicating about this type of action.)