Largely agree, a couple of extra thoughts:
Warning shots are useless unless legislators and people know how to respond to them. Just telling people “something is scary” and no call to action desensitises them to the risks of the scary thing. Whether that’s calling for a pause, or having a list of minimum safety standards for labs, the message needs to be coherent and something people can repeat.
As you state, there is a real lack of “off the shelf” policy proposals that are available for people to push for. Has anyone tried to collate a set of empirical alignment/control techniques that are reasonably effective and labs should implement? (e.g. OAI only recently implemented live CoT monitoring)
To the extent these are open questions, then the push should be for safety research transparency, or similar governance solutions
Whatever the standards are, there should be some sort of consensus. Perhaps that’s another open letter from safety scientists saying this is what we should do, and even if it gets ignored, it pushes the needle some amount of the way (e.g. “9/10 safety scientists agree we should do X”)
Just because a warning shot occurs does not mean the media will a) listen to it, and b) internalise it in the way you want. For instance, very little mainstream reporting has been done about the METR/Redwood report, and the only example I could find in my media sphere spends a large portion of the article writing about criticisms to Dwarkesh’s summary, rather than the implications of the event. I think it would be helpful to do more outreach, e.g. writing to politicians, or orgs like METR, Redwood, MIRI, FLI, CAIS etc to reach out to international news organisations and offer to interview (though I obviously have no idea whether orgs were doing this and were just turned down). In general, the lack of advocacy systems and procedures hurts our ability to capitalise on warning shots.
Warning shots are one of the few ways that we can demonstrably show the harms of AI systems and how they affect the average person, and in particular, this warning shot was very helpful of breaking the “Terminator” stigma. On your last point of avoiding “weirdness”, I think that shows too much hesitancy, especially at this stage. This is no longer sci-fi, we have a real life example which affected people, and if we self-censor to make sure we remain “in the Overton window” we risk underselling, which is the far larger issue.
https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/117269745153543631
Based on his most recent Truth Social post, this seems unlikely.