My feeling of the plan pre-pivotal-act era was “figure out the theory of how to build a safe AI at all, and try to get whoever is building to adopt that approach”, and that MIRI wasn’t taking any steps to be the ones building it. I also had the model that due to psychological unity of mankind, anyone building an aligned[ with them] AGI was a good outcome compared to someone building unaligned. Like even if it was Xi Jinping, a sovereign aligned with him would be okay (and not obviously that dramatically different from anyone else?). I’m not sure how much this was MIRI positions vs fragments that I combined in my own head that came from assorted places and were never policy.
My feeling of the plan pre-pivotal-act era was “figure out the theory of how to build a safe AI at all, and try to get whoever is building to adopt that approach”, and that MIRI wasn’t taking any steps to be the ones building it. I also had the model that due to psychological unity of mankind, anyone building an aligned[ with them] AGI was a good outcome compared to someone building unaligned. Like even if it was Xi Jinping, a sovereign aligned with him would be okay (and not obviously that dramatically different from anyone else?). I’m not sure how much this was MIRI positions vs fragments that I combined in my own head that came from assorted places and were never policy.
Well, I can tell you that they definitely planned to build the Friendly AI, after figuring out how.
See this other comment.
Pretty solid evidence.