I agree it’s not necessarily a good idea to go around founding the Let’s Commit A Pivotal Act AI Company.
But I think there’s room for subtlety somewhere like “Conditional on you being in a situation where you could take a pivotal act, which is a small and unusual fraction of world-branches, maybe you should take a pivotal act.”
That is, if you are in a position where you have the option to build an AI capable of destroying all competing AI projects, the moment you notice this you should update heavily in favor of short timelines (zero in your case, but everyone else should be close behind) and fast takeoff speeds (since your AI has these impressive capabilities). You should also update on existing AI regulation being insufficient (since it was insufficient to prevent you)
Somewhere halfway between “found the Let’s Commit A Pivotal Act Company” and “if you happen to stumble into a pivotal act, take it”, there’s an intervention to spread a norm of “if a good person who cares about the world happens to stumble into a pivotal-act-capable AI, take the opportunity”. I don’t think this norm would necessarily accelerate a race. After all, bad people who want to seize power can take pivotal acts whether we want them to or not. The only people who are bound by norms are good people who care about the future of humanity. I, as someone with no loyalty to any individual AI team, would prefer that (good, norm-following) teams take pivotal acts if they happen to end up with the first superintelligence, rather than not doing that.
Another way to think about this is that all good people should be equally happy with any other good person creating a pivotal AGI, so they won’t need to race among themselves. They might be less happy with a bad person creating a pivotal AGI, but in that case you should race and you have no other option. I realize “good” and “bad” are very simplistic but I don’t think adding real moral complexity changes the calculation much.
I am more concerned about your point where someone rushes into a pivotal act without being sure their own AI is aligned. I agree this would be very dangerous, but it seems like a job for normal cost-benefit calculation: what’s the risk of your AI being unaligned if you act now, vs. someone else creating an unaligned AI if you wait X amount of time? Do we have any reason to think teams would be systematically biased when making this calculation?
Update: I interviewed many of the people involved and feel like I understand the situation better.
My main conclusion is that I was wrong about Michael making people psychotic. Everyone I talked to had some other risk factor, like a preexisting family or personal history, or took recreational drugs at doses that would explain their psychotic episodes.
Michael has a tendency to befriend people with high trait psychoticism and heavy drug use, and often has strong opinions on their treatment, which explains why he is often very close to people and very noticeable at the moment they become psychotic. But aside from one case where he recommended someone take a drug that made a bad situation slightly worse, and the general Berkeley rationalist scene that he (and I and everyone else here) is a part of having lots of crazy ideas that are psychologically stressful, I no longer think he is a major cause.
While interviewing the people involved, I did get some additional reasons to worry that he uses cult-y high-pressure recruitment tactics on people he wants things from, in ways that make me continue to be nervous about the effect he *could* have on people. But the original claim I made that I knew of specific cases of psychosis which he substantially helped precipitate turned out to be wrong, and I apologize to him and to Jessica. Jessica’s later post https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pQGFeKvjydztpgnsY/occupational-infohazards explained in more detail what happened to her, including the role of MIRI and of Michael and his friends, and everything she said there matches what I found too. Insofar as anything I wrote above produces impressions that differs from her explanation, assume that she is right and I am wrong.
Since the interviews involve a lot of private people’s private details, I won’t be posting anything more substantial than this publicly without a lot of thoughts and discussion. If for some reason this is important to you, let me know and I can send you a more detailed summary of my thoughts.
I’m deliberately leaving this comment in this obscure place for now while I talk to Michael and Jessica about whether they would prefer a more public apology that also brings all of this back to people’s attention again.