If AI 2027 wants to cause stakeholders like the White House’s point man on AI to take the idea of a pause seriously, instead of considering a pause to be something which might harm America in an arms race with China, it appears to have failed completely at doing that.
This seems like an uncharitable reading of the Vance quote IMO. The fact that you have the Vice President of the United States mentioning that a pause is even a conceivable option due to concerns about AI escaping human control seems like an immensely positive outcome for any single piece of writing.
The US policy community has been engaged in great power competition with China for over a decade. The default frame for any sort of emerging technology is “we must beat China.”
IMO, the fact that Vance did not immediately dismiss the prospect of slowing down suggests to me that he has at least some genuine understanding of & appreciation for the misalignment/LOC threat model.
A pause obviously hurts the US in the AI race with China. The AI race with China is not a construct that AI2027 invented—policymakers have been talking about the AI race for a long time. They usually think about AI as a “normal technology” (sort of like how “we must lead in drones”), rather than a race to AGI or superintelligence.
But overall, I would not place the blame on AI2027 for causing people to think about pausing in the context of US-China AI competition. Rather, I think if one appreciates the baseline (US should lead, US must beat China, go faster on emerging tech), the fact that Vance did not immediately dismiss the idea of pausing (and instead brought up what IMO is a reasonable consideration about whether or not one could figure out if China was going to pause//slow down) is a big accomplishment.
If you present this dichotomy to policymakers the pause loses 100 times out of 100, and this is a complete failure, imho. This dichotomy is what I would present to policymakers if I wanted to inoculate them against any arguments for regulation.
This seems like an uncharitable reading of the Vance quote IMO. The fact that you have the Vice President of the United States mentioning that a pause is even a conceivable option due to concerns about AI escaping human control seems like an immensely positive outcome for any single piece of writing.
The US policy community has been engaged in great power competition with China for over a decade. The default frame for any sort of emerging technology is “we must beat China.”
IMO, the fact that Vance did not immediately dismiss the prospect of slowing down suggests to me that he has at least some genuine understanding of & appreciation for the misalignment/LOC threat model.
A pause obviously hurts the US in the AI race with China. The AI race with China is not a construct that AI2027 invented—policymakers have been talking about the AI race for a long time. They usually think about AI as a “normal technology” (sort of like how “we must lead in drones”), rather than a race to AGI or superintelligence.
But overall, I would not place the blame on AI2027 for causing people to think about pausing in the context of US-China AI competition. Rather, I think if one appreciates the baseline (US should lead, US must beat China, go faster on emerging tech), the fact that Vance did not immediately dismiss the idea of pausing (and instead brought up what IMO is a reasonable consideration about whether or not one could figure out if China was going to pause//slow down) is a big accomplishment.
If you present this dichotomy to policymakers the pause loses 100 times out of 100, and this is a complete failure, imho. This dichotomy is what I would present to policymakers if I wanted to inoculate them against any arguments for regulation.