Akash comments on AGI safety career advice

[Akash]

(Pasting this exchange from a comment thread on the EA Forum; bolding added)

Peter Park:

Thank you so much for your insightful and detailed list of ideas for AGI safety careers, Richard! I really appreciate your excellent post.

I would propose explicitly grouping some of your ideas and additional ones under a third category: “identifying and raising public awareness of AGI’s dangers.” In fact, I think this category may plausibly contain some of the most impactful ideas for reducing catastrophic and existential risks, given that alignment seems potentially difficult to achieve in a reasonable period of time (if ever) and the implementation of governance ideas is bottlenecked by public support.

For a similar argument that I found particularly compelling, please check out Greg Colbourn’s recent post: https://​​forum.effectivealtruism.org/​​posts/​​8YXFaM9yHbhiJTPqp/​​agi-rising-why-we-are-in-a-new-era-of-acute-risk-and

Richard:

I don’t actually think the implementation of governance ideas is mainly bottlenecked by public support; I think it’s bottlenecked by good concrete proposals. And to the extent that it is bottlenecked by public support, that will change by default as more powerful AI systems are released.

Akash:

I appreciate Richard stating this explicitly. I think this is (and has been) a pretty big crux in the AI governance space right now.

Some folks (like Richard) believe that we’re mainly bottlenecked by good concrete proposals. Other folks believe that we have concrete proposals, but we need to raise awareness and political support in order to implement them.

I’d like to see more work going into both of these areas. On the margin, though, I’m currently more excited about efforts to raise awareness [well], acquire political support, and channel that support into achieving useful policies.

I think this is largely due to (a) my perception that this work is largely neglected, (b) the fact that a few AI governance professionals I trust have also stated that they see this as the higher priority thing at the moment, and (c) worldview beliefs around what kind of regulation is warranted (e.g., being more sympathetic to proposals that require a lot of political will).