Why did Scott Alexander (one of the authors of the original AI 2027 paper) not join/contribute to this one?
AI 2040: Plan A
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Re: AI 2040: Plan A
#12Kind of feels like fusion power at this point, always just around the corner.
Re: AI 2040: Plan A
#13I'm sure some people will have issue with my phrasing but, honest question: Are there examples of where we have collective decided not to pursue knowledge? Successfully? I guess nuclear weapons might be the best example though research doesn't seem have to actually "stopped" as much as gone underground and we still have country trying to climb that ladder. But I don't know how relevant that is to LLMs/AI. It almost f…
No, of course not. That would be an insane trust fall. Even relatively small advances in technology give a country world dominating power. Fun fact: India was militarily superior to Britain in the 1600s—a gunpowder empire with a million soldiers—but was taken over by it in the 1700s. Britain’s edge was small: lighter, more maneuverable cannons, standardized ammunition, better military and political organization. Not a first world country versus a third world country—more like the dynamic US versus a sclerotic EU. And that modest edge led to 200 years of colonization.
If we slow down on ASI voluntarily we’d be allowing a gap to open up that would make the difference between colonial europe and colonized Asia/Africa look trivial. It would be insane.
Re: AI 2040: Plan A
#14This is whole a slippery slope. Always building on assumption of infinite exponential growth. But every exponential is at a certain point a sigmoid.
Re: AI 2040: Plan A
#15If carbon taxes are already a lethal policy for an political campaign, it's absurd to think that fears of ASI will create any real movement around pausing AI. If there is any movement to pause AI development, it will come from the general public's dislike of these companies. Not from the AI safety angle.
If that is true and one cares about a moratorium on progress in the US then it seems like the number one way is to meet people where they are: so water use misinformation, degrowth, power supply constraints. That does place all the people who push for these things in a different light. They may well be attempting to do what the AI safety labs are ostensibly trying to do.
As an AI safetyist, one’s closest ally (in a distributed coordinated way) is the populist misinformer. Fascinating.
Re: AI 2040: Plan A
#16Why did Scott Alexander (one of the authors of the original AI 2027 paper) not join/contribute to this one?
Hey, author here! Scott did contribute, but less than before.
On his blog he says: "I did a lot of writing for AI 2027 and was listed as a co-author. Some of my writing made it into Plan A too, but it was a bit less. The difference is of degree rather than kind, but because of this - and to give me more latitude to discuss it the way I like with less PR blowback - we decided not to put me as a co-author this time. I continue to be proud of having a part in this, small as it may be. (related: everything in this post is my opinion only, and not officially endorsed by the AI Futures Project)"
Re: AI 2040: Plan A
#17If carbon taxes are already a lethal policy for an political campaign, it's absurd to think that fears of ASI will create any real movement around pausing AI. If there is any movement to pause AI development, it will come from the general public's dislike of these companies. Not from the AI safety angle.
If that is true and one cares about a moratorium on progress in the US then it seems like the number one way is to meet people where they are: so water use misinformation, degrowth, power supply constraints. That does place all the people who push for these things in a different light. They may well be attempting to do what the AI safety labs are ostensibly trying to do. As an AI safetyist, one’s closest ally (in a d…
If there's going to be any pause, I'm sure it will come from a populist movement. I just can't imagine misplaced worries about AI water use will translate into the kinds of policy the authors want to see.
Re: AI 2040: Plan A
#18I'm sure some people will have issue with my phrasing but, honest question: Are there examples of where we have collective decided not to pursue knowledge? Successfully? I guess nuclear weapons might be the best example though research doesn't seem have to actually "stopped" as much as gone underground and we still have country trying to climb that ladder. But I don't know how relevant that is to LLMs/AI. It almost f…
If you read the scenario, you'll see that the regulations are mostly about what people can do with giant compute clusters, and not about the ideas themselves. The ideas themselves are required to be totally transparent to the public.
As for historic precedents: Human cloning, human genome editing, and mirror life seem like one precedent; nuclear weapons and nuclear energy another; come to think of it I think drone delivery was strangled by regulations too...? Plan A isn't a proposal to never build superintelligence, it's a proposal to build it more cautiously and transparently.
Re: AI 2040: Plan A
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
If that is true and one cares about a moratorium on progress in the US then it seems like the number one way is to meet people where they are: so water use misinformation, degrowth, power supply constraints. That does place all the people who push for these things in a different light. They may well be attempting to do what the AI safety labs are ostensibly trying to do. As an AI safetyist, one’s closest ally (in a d…
If there's going to be any pause, I'm sure it will come from a populist movement. I just can't imagine misplaced worries about AI water use will translate into the kinds of policy the authors want to see.
Yeah it’s like shoving the top of a double pendulum. You will get some movement in one direction, but where it will precisely land is hard to predict. The water-use argument is already earning refinement by differentiating “AI datacenters” from “normal datacenters” in an effort to control the movement.
I imagine any populism movement will require rampant fearmongering to get a result. Considering the rough present alignments, presumably blue tribe focused propaganda will involve climate and inequality focused fear and red tribe focused propaganda will involve job loss. Grey tribe positioning is the P(doom) meme where everyone is rewarded for a high-P(doom) estimate.
Re: AI 2040: Plan A
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