My guess is that it’s a good fit for other intros but not this one. My guess is that most readers are already attuned to the idea that “tech company CEOs having absolute control over radically powerful and transformative technologies may not be good for me”, so the primary advantages of including it in my article are:
Signaling: Giving readers assurances that I’m not naive to those risks
Precisification: Giving readers more precise models for how exactly this could go bad whereas before they might only have loose models.
Against those advantages I’m balancing against a) making the article even longer and more confusing to navigate (this article isn’t maximally long but it’s like 2500 words not including footnotes and captions, and when we were conceptualizing this article in the abstract Claude and I were targeting more like 1k-1.2k words), and b) making the “bad AI CEO taking over the world” memes swamp other messages.
But again, I think this is just my own choice for this specific article. I think other people should talk about concentration-of-power risks at least sometimes, and I can imagine researching or writing more about it in the future for other articles myself too.
My guess is that it’s a good fit for other intros but not this one. My guess is that most readers are already attuned to the idea that “tech company CEOs having absolute control over radically powerful and transformative technologies may not be good for me”, so the primary advantages of including it in my article are:
Signaling: Giving readers assurances that I’m not naive to those risks
Precisification: Giving readers more precise models for how exactly this could go bad whereas before they might only have loose models.
Against those advantages I’m balancing against a) making the article even longer and more confusing to navigate (this article isn’t maximally long but it’s like 2500 words not including footnotes and captions, and when we were conceptualizing this article in the abstract Claude and I were targeting more like 1k-1.2k words), and b) making the “bad AI CEO taking over the world” memes swamp other messages.
But again, I think this is just my own choice for this specific article. I think other people should talk about concentration-of-power risks at least sometimes, and I can imagine researching or writing more about it in the future for other articles myself too.