Did this case update you to think “If you’re trying to pass a good bill, you need to state and emphasize the good reasons you want to pass that bill, and what actually matters”. If so, why? The lesson I think one would naively take from this story is an update in the direction of: “if you want to pass a good bill, you should try to throw in a bunch of stuff you don’t actually care about but that others do and build a giant coalition, or make disingenuous but politically expedient arguments for your good stuff, or try to make out people who oppose the bill to be woke people who hate trump, etc”?
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The opposition that ultimately killed the bill seems to have had essentially nothing to do with the things I worry most about. It did not appear to be driven by worries about existential or catastrophic risk, and those worries were not expressed aloud almost at all (with the fun exception of Joe Rogan). That does not mean that such concerns weren’t operating in the background, I presume they did have a large impact in that way, but it wasn’t voiced.
....
I am happy the moratorium did not pass, but this was a terrible bit of discourse. It does not bode well for the future. No one on any side of this, based on everything I have heard, raised any actual issues of AI long term governance, or offered any plan on what to do. One side tried to nuke all regulations of any kind from orbit, and the other thought that nuke might have some unfortunate side effects on copyright. The whole thing got twisted up in knots to fit it into a budget bill.
How does this relate to the question of which arguments to make and emphasize about AI going forward? My guess is that a lot of this has to do with the fact that this fight was about voting down a terrible bill rather than trying to pass a good bill.
If you’re trying to pass a good bill, you need to state and emphasize the good reasons you want to pass that bill, and what actually matters, as Note Sores explained recently at LessWrong. You can and should also offer reasons for those with other concerns to support the bill, and help address those concerns. As we saw here, a lot of politicians care largely about different narrow specific concerns.
Did this case update you to think “If you’re trying to pass a good bill, you need to state and emphasize the good reasons you want to pass that bill, and what actually matters”. If so, why? The lesson I think one would naively take from this story is an update in the direction of: “if you want to pass a good bill, you should try to throw in a bunch of stuff you don’t actually care about but that others do and build a giant coalition, or make disingenuous but politically expedient arguments for your good stuff, or try to make out people who oppose the bill to be woke people who hate trump, etc”?
Relevant quotes: