Justin Olive comments on Bridge Thinking and Wall Thinking

[Justin Olive]

Here’s the feedback I gave to Jay, which he encouraged me to add as a comment:

(this is mostly just me playing devils advocate for the wall perspective)

This is actually awesome and something I think would be a great contribution to AI safety discourse

I do think the wall framing is pretty cool

Perhaps another useful test case is asking what this would look like if you applied the same approaches to climate change, where we have lots more historical data

In climate, there’s actually a legally binding international treaty, it’s called the Paris Agreement. While incrementally impactful, it definitely hasn’t solved climate change.

This kinda illustrates how, from the “wall” perspective, there is no bridge, there is a large swathe of functions executed by many thousands of people across the field.

Here’s the intuition for that:

Examples of two archetypes within climate science:

1. The person who is designing a component within a device that measures gas ratios in ice core samples, to inform climate modelling

2. The secretary of the UN Climate Change Secretariat, which was responsible for organising the Paris Agreement

If you deleted function 1, it would have less adverse effects than if you deleted function 2. However, if you deleted most of the functions that looked like “design CO2 measurement device”, progress would mostly grind to a halt, and there’s a risk you wouldn’t have an international treaty, because that international treaty coordination was heavily influenced by thousands of “marginal” functions with diffuse impacts.

So in effect, you might argue there’s not much difference, because you can’t have 2 without 1, and in reality, it’s hard to know which functions within category 1 you can go without, so a good strategy is to just do as many as possible, with some common-sense prioritisation.

So the main constraint comes down to resourcing & capacity—i.e. how much wall can you build per unit of time?