Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not long at all. Presumably you could write the method on the back of a napkin to lead another top AI researcher to the same result. That’s why trying to sit on breakthroughs is the worst option and making sure they are widely distributed along with alignment methods is the best option.
And what if there are no alignment methods.
This will be solved like all other engineering and science: with experiments and iteration, in a controlled setting where potential accidents will have small consequences.
An unaligned system isn’t even useful, let alone safe. If it turns out that unaligned AGI is very hard, we will obviously not deploy it into the world at scale. It’s bad for the bottom line to be dead.
But there’s truly no way out but forward; game theory constrains paranoid actors more than the reckless. A good balance must be found, and we’re pretty close to it.
None of the «lesswrong» doomsday hypotheses have much evidence for them, if that changes then we will reassess.