Nonetheless, I acknowledge that my disagreement with these proposals often comes down to a more fundamental disagreement about the difficulty of alignment, rather than any beliefs about the social response to AI risk.
My guess is that this disagreement (about the difficulty of alignment) also mostly explains the disagreement about humanity’s relative attentiveness/competence. If the recent regulatory moves seem encouraging to you, I can see how that would seem like counterevidence to the claim that governments are unlikely to help much with AI risk.
But personally it doesn’t seem like much counterevidence, because the recent moves haven’t seemed very encouraging. They’ve struck me as slightly encouraging, insofar as they’ve caused me to update slightly upwards that governments might eventually coordinate to entirely halt AI development. But absent the sort of scientific understanding we typically have when deploying high-risk engineering projects—where e.g., we can answer at least most of the basic questions about how the systems work, and generally understand how to predict in advance what will happen if we do various things, etc.—little short of a Stop is going to reduce my alarm much.
My guess is that this disagreement (about the difficulty of alignment) also mostly explains the disagreement about humanity’s relative attentiveness/competence. If the recent regulatory moves seem encouraging to you, I can see how that would seem like counterevidence to the claim that governments are unlikely to help much with AI risk.
But personally it doesn’t seem like much counterevidence, because the recent moves haven’t seemed very encouraging. They’ve struck me as slightly encouraging, insofar as they’ve caused me to update slightly upwards that governments might eventually coordinate to entirely halt AI development. But absent the sort of scientific understanding we typically have when deploying high-risk engineering projects—where e.g., we can answer at least most of the basic questions about how the systems work, and generally understand how to predict in advance what will happen if we do various things, etc.—little short of a Stop is going to reduce my alarm much.