One frustration I have about people on LessWrong and elsewhere is that people love criticizing every advice/strategy, while never truly supporting any alternatives.
Most upvoted comments here argue against PauseAI, or even claim that asking for a pause overall is a waste of political capital...!
Yet I remember when I proposed an open letter arguing for government funding for AI alignment, the Statement on AI Inconsistency. After writing emails and private messages, the only reply was “sorry, this strategy isn’t good, because we should just focus on pausing AI.”
I feel my open letter is more likely to succeed than pausing AI (I’m demanding that the AI alignment budget be “belief-consistent” with the military budget).
When politicians reject pausing AI, they just need the easy belief of “China must not win,” or “if we don’t do it someone else will.” But for politicians to reject my open letter, they need the difficult belief of being 99.999% sure of no AI catastrophe, thus 99.95% sure most experts are wrong.
Regardless, where are the people who favour the middle ground? Who neither argue that “asking for a pause is a waste of political capital because it’s hopeless,” nor argue that “asking for government funding is a waste of time, because we should just focus on pausing AI?”
One frustration I have about people on LessWrong and elsewhere is that people love criticizing every advice/strategy, while never truly supporting any alternatives.
Most upvoted comments here argue against PauseAI, or even claim that asking for a pause overall is a waste of political capital...!
Yet I remember when I proposed an open letter arguing for government funding for AI alignment, the Statement on AI Inconsistency. After writing emails and private messages, the only reply was “sorry, this strategy isn’t good, because we should just focus on pausing AI.”
I feel my open letter is more likely to succeed than pausing AI (I’m demanding that the AI alignment budget be “belief-consistent” with the military budget).
When politicians reject pausing AI, they just need the easy belief of “China must not win,” or “if we don’t do it someone else will.” But for politicians to reject my open letter, they need the difficult belief of being 99.999% sure of no AI catastrophe, thus 99.95% sure most experts are wrong.
Regardless, where are the people who favour the middle ground? Who neither argue that “asking for a pause is a waste of political capital because it’s hopeless,” nor argue that “asking for government funding is a waste of time, because we should just focus on pausing AI?”
It’s like the status game of criticism, that Wei Dai pointed out.