I’m not a fan of *generic* regulation-boosting. Like, if I just had a megaphone to shout to the world, “More regulation of AI!” I would not use it. I want to do more targeted advocacy of regulation that I think is more likely to be good and less likely to result in regulatory-capture
What are specific regulations / existing proposals that you think are likely to be good? When people are protesting to pause AI, what do you want them to be speaking into a megaphone (if you think those kinds of protests could be helpful at all right now)?
Reporting requirements, especially requirements to report to the public what your internal system capabilities are, so that it’s impossible to have a secret AGI project. Also reporting requirements of the form “write a document explaining what capabilities, goals/values, constraints, etc. your AIs are supposed to have, and justifying those claims, and submit it to public scrutiny. So e.g. if your argument is ‘we RLHF’d it to have those goals and constraints, and that probably works because there’s No Evidence of deceptive alignment or other speculative failure modes’ then at least the world can see that no, you don’t have any better arguments than that.
That would be my minimal proposal. My maximal proposal would be something like “AGI research must be conducted in one place: the United Nations AGI Project, with a diverse group of nations able to see what’s happening in the project and vote on each new major training run and have their own experts argue about the safety case etc.”
There’s a bunch of options in between.
I’d be quite happy with an AGI Pause if it happened, I just don’t think it’s going to happen, the corporations are too powerful. I also think that some of the other proposals are strictly better while also being more politically feasible. (They are more complicated and easily corrupted though, which to me is the appeal of calling for a pause. Harder to get regulatory-captured than something more nuanced.)
From the comment thread:
What are specific regulations / existing proposals that you think are likely to be good? When people are protesting to pause AI, what do you want them to be speaking into a megaphone (if you think those kinds of protests could be helpful at all right now)?
Reporting requirements, especially requirements to report to the public what your internal system capabilities are, so that it’s impossible to have a secret AGI project. Also reporting requirements of the form “write a document explaining what capabilities, goals/values, constraints, etc. your AIs are supposed to have, and justifying those claims, and submit it to public scrutiny. So e.g. if your argument is ‘we RLHF’d it to have those goals and constraints, and that probably works because there’s No Evidence of deceptive alignment or other speculative failure modes’ then at least the world can see that no, you don’t have any better arguments than that.
That would be my minimal proposal. My maximal proposal would be something like “AGI research must be conducted in one place: the United Nations AGI Project, with a diverse group of nations able to see what’s happening in the project and vote on each new major training run and have their own experts argue about the safety case etc.”
There’s a bunch of options in between.
I’d be quite happy with an AGI Pause if it happened, I just don’t think it’s going to happen, the corporations are too powerful. I also think that some of the other proposals are strictly better while also being more politically feasible. (They are more complicated and easily corrupted though, which to me is the appeal of calling for a pause. Harder to get regulatory-captured than something more nuanced.)