Thanks for spelling it out, I did feel smth like this, but only when I thought about “working on AI pause” vs. “working on technical alignment”. A pause is a very specific and real thing, and it requires talking and interacting with real people and existing systems, and we know from real life how easily those can go wrong. When you are “working on technical alignment”, the object you are working with is a future, nonexistent technology, and if you notice problems with your current best guess of how to make it safe, you can just go “huh, we should add this to our list of open problems to fix before we actually build the thing”, and this feels like making progress. But when working on a pause, you can’t just say “huh, our government isn’t optimal, I’ll add ‘fix democracy’ to the list of open problems”, you have to work with the real, imperfect thing.
Thanks for spelling it out, I did feel smth like this, but only when I thought about “working on AI pause” vs. “working on technical alignment”. A pause is a very specific and real thing, and it requires talking and interacting with real people and existing systems, and we know from real life how easily those can go wrong. When you are “working on technical alignment”, the object you are working with is a future, nonexistent technology, and if you notice problems with your current best guess of how to make it safe, you can just go “huh, we should add this to our list of open problems to fix before we actually build the thing”, and this feels like making progress. But when working on a pause, you can’t just say “huh, our government isn’t optimal, I’ll add ‘fix democracy’ to the list of open problems”, you have to work with the real, imperfect thing.