I just don’t know. This seems like a very off-distribution move from Eliezer—which I suspect is in large part the point: when your model predicts doom by default, you go off-distribution in search of higher-variance regions of outcome space. So I suppose from his viewpoint, this action does make some sense; I am (however) vaguely annoyed on behalf of other alignment teams, whose jobs I at least mildly predict will get harder as a result of this.
Personally, I think Eliezer’s article is actually just great for trying to get real policy change to happen here. It’s not clear to me why Eliezer saying this would make anything harder for other policy proposals. (Not that I agree with everything he said, I just think it was good that he said it.)
I am much more conflicted about the FLI letter; it’s particular policy proscription seems not great to me and I worry it makes us look pretty bad if we try approximately the same thing again with a better policy proscription after this one fails, which is approximately what I expect we’ll need to do.
(Though to be fair this is as someone who’s also very much on the pessimistic side and so tends to like variance.)
It would’ve been even better for this to happen long before the year of the prediction mentioned in this old blog-post, but this is better than nothing.
Personally, I think Eliezer’s article is actually just great for trying to get real policy change to happen here. It’s not clear to me why Eliezer saying this would make anything harder for other policy proposals. (Not that I agree with everything he said, I just think it was good that he said it.)
I am much more conflicted about the FLI letter; it’s particular policy proscription seems not great to me and I worry it makes us look pretty bad if we try approximately the same thing again with a better policy proscription after this one fails, which is approximately what I expect we’ll need to do.
(Though to be fair this is as someone who’s also very much on the pessimistic side and so tends to like variance.)
It would’ve been even better for this to happen long before the year of the prediction mentioned in this old blog-post, but this is better than nothing.