Great post! Far too much writing about ASI geopolitics assumes uninformed, irrational, & neutered versions of state actors, and it’s good to see some analysis that doesn’t.
Max Winga
Karma: 192
I’m not, nor have I ever been, an EA, similar to many AI experts to whom this post is addressed. It’s also not addressed to a movement, it’s addressed to individuals. If anything, the DoW’s reaction to dunk on Anthropic for being woke is exactly a symptom of experts stepping out of their lane into partisan politics and getting owned for it.
Restricting what AIs say is indeed a real phenomena, and technical AI safety is getting owned by it. This is a symptom of poor messaging and a lot of focus being on preventing AIs from saying bad words which indeed has ~nothing to do with ASI safety research. It’s my belief that AI safety is so utterly behind that it would be better if ~everyone stopped working on it to warn the world about how dangerous of a situation we’re in so we can ban ASI development internationally. Not only does “safety” research almost always boost capabilities, it also “safety-washes” companies racing to build extinction devices, and a shortage of public experts warning about the danger and putting their work where their mouth is also hurts the situation.
The point is understanding who you are in the equation. 90-99% of the people reading this aren’t Influencers in any meaningful capacity to the general public (maybe within the EA/Rat bubble). You’re likely to be the first informed person a member of the public ever hears talk about the subject, and the public’s views on AI are roughly at the level of “AI good” or “AI bad” right now. A nuanced perspective where people are considering the views of many AI safety people is a bit naive.
What you can do is work to convince pre-existing Influencers to take up the AI safety cause, and we should be working with many Influencers of many political persuasions. It’s much more valuable for you to operate as a non-partisan expert.
We’re should be trying to avoid the failures that other science communicators have failed by seeming like partisan hacks, not experts to be taken seriously. We don’t want the argument to be over the political persuasions of the AI safety experts, rather than the content of the warnings.
When it comes to areas where AI intersects with other issues, it’s generally very credibility-boosting to demonstrate an understanding of the various positions on the issue and then explain where AI risk (or your particular subject) intersects or doesn’t.
A common example of this in Europe is the question about whether banning ASI hurts the economy or relations with the US too much. When someone throws you this question it can be good to give the high-level summary of the various positions people have on this, and then point out that regardless of the economic impact in the present, uncontrolled ASI is the worst possible outcome, so it’s in everyone’s benefit to ensure this doesn’t happen at essentially any cost. Beyond that, the question of how to regulate (or not) other AI issues like environmental impact, deepfakes, or misinformation have different tradeoffs to consider.
Related aside:
People, especially those in politics, will respect you for demonstrating a clear understanding of the policy landscape and for sticking to giving advice within your expertise, without getting sloppy with personal politics. An observation I’ve made at the top-level of politics is that everyone is for the most part aware that they’re all playing The Game, and understand each others’ positions well. Unlike at Thanksgiving, you don’t need to avoid being a bit meta about the political landscape.
I’m still at ControlAI, where I do creator outreach and work on messaging around AI extinction risk and banning ASI :)
Hey! We do both work at ControlAI. I didn’t know there was a strict norm about disclosing being colleagues with people when commenting on their posts (I’m fairly new to using LW): is that the case?
But just in case anyone is wondering, it’s not like I was told to comment positively on this. Alex mentioned he wrote it in a personal capacity on Slack and I just read it and thought it was good.