I especially liked that this paper was a collaboration between Chinese and Western scientists. I’ve been frustrated by people in the West responding to requests to slow down and regulate AI development with “but China will get there first!”. China is regulating AI more than the West does, if not out of fear of AI x-risk. There is no arms race unless people decide there’s an arms race! Insisting that there is, and there’s no way we can co-operate with China because golly, they’ve got all these supposed incentives to race ahead risks creating an arms race.
Additionally, I’m under the impression that there’s not much discussion of technical AI-risk in China. Hopefully some top-tier researchers speaking out, in collaboration with Western researchers, will prompt the Chinese government to reach out to their researchers and go “wait, you think AI is going to do what?”. Instead of, you know, thinking this is just a crazy Western thing which is just as a facade by Western governments to [???].
Co-author here. The paper’s coverage in TIME does a pretty good job of giving useful background.
Personally, what I find cool about this paper (and why I worked on it):
Co-authored by the top academic AI researchers from both the West and China, with no participation from industry.
The first detailed explanation of societal-scale risks from AI from a group of highly credible experts
The first joint expert statement on what governments and tech companies should do (aside from pausing AI).
It is cool that you all did this.
I especially liked that this paper was a collaboration between Chinese and Western scientists. I’ve been frustrated by people in the West responding to requests to slow down and regulate AI development with “but China will get there first!”. China is regulating AI more than the West does, if not out of fear of AI x-risk. There is no arms race unless people decide there’s an arms race! Insisting that there is, and there’s no way we can co-operate with China because golly, they’ve got all these supposed incentives to race ahead risks creating an arms race.
Additionally, I’m under the impression that there’s not much discussion of technical AI-risk in China. Hopefully some top-tier researchers speaking out, in collaboration with Western researchers, will prompt the Chinese government to reach out to their researchers and go “wait, you think AI is going to do what?”. Instead of, you know, thinking this is just a crazy Western thing which is just as a facade by Western governments to [???].