I know that civics class taught us about how the president and his advisors uses the threat of vetoing legislation to exert influence over legislation, but the vast majority of both policymaking capability and policymaking knowledge is held by domain-specific people outside the white house e.g. throughout the executive branch, such as lobbyists, natsec folk, leaders of regulator bureaucracies, etc.
Although the president and his advisors might plausibly be one of the best policy levers, their time is limited, and their interest is highly limited by the many elites in the US who spend tons of money trying to persuade the president and his advisors to care about their issue (both “persuasion” as a euphemism for bribery/lobbying, but notably literal persuasion as well).
This has been done for hundreds of years, and by now the established elites are so much better positioned than anyone adjacent to AI safety (including Altman himself), that this dynamic basically explains why presidents and their advisors aren’t interested in AI risk; they assume that, given that a policy or issue has made it all the way to their desk, odds are high that the immense optimization pressure that got it there was optimization pressure that was funded by people anticipating a probability of a return on their investment.
The president might not hold enough power to singlehandedly change everything, but they still probably have more power than pretty much any other individual. And lobbying them hasn’t been all that ineffective in the past; the AI safety crowd seems to have been involved in the original executive order. I’d expect there to be more progress if we can get a president who’s sympathetic to the cause.
The president might not hold enough power to singlehandedly change everything, but they still probably have more power than pretty much any other individual.
None of us have solid models on how much power the president has.
The president and his advisors probably don’t actually control the nuclear arsenal; that’s probably a lie, the military probably doesn’t hand over control of the nuclear arsenal to a rando and his election campaign team every 4-8 years.
Some parts of the constitution are de-facto more respected than others; if the president and his advisors had substantial real power over the military, then both the US Natsec community and foreign intelligence agencies would be very, very heavily involved in the presidential primary process (what we’ve seen from foreign intelligence agencies so far seems more like targeting public opinion than altering the results of the election).
The president and his advisors influence over the federal legislative process is less opaque, but the details of how that works are worth massive amounts of money because it allows people to navigate the space (and the information becomes worthless if everyone knows it).
Plus, most presidents are probably far more nihilistic and self-interested in-person than in front of the cameras, and probably became hardcore conflict theorists due to being so deeply immersed in an environment where words are used as weapons (it the legislative process too, not just public opinion).
So getting a powerful president to support good AI policy would be nice, but it’s probably not worth the effort; there are other people in the executive branch with a better ratio of cost-to-access vs unambiguous policy influence.
And lobbying them hasn’t been all that ineffective in the past; the AI safety crowd seems to have been involved in the original executive order.
We don’t know this either, it’s too early to tell. These institutions are extremely, extremely sophisticated at finding clever ways to make elites feel involved, when in reality the niche has already been filled by the elites who arrived first.
For example, your text makes its way into the final bill which gets passed, but the bureaucracy ignores it because it didn’t have the keywords that signal that your text is actually supposed to be enforced.
Policy influence is measured in real-world results, not effortlessly-generated stuff that looks like policy influence. And the AI safety crowd has barely even gotten their text into their bill (which primarily prioritized accelerating American AI as effectively as possible).
I’m not denying that the military and government are secretive. But there’s a difference between keeping things from the American people, and keeping them from the president. When it comes to whether the president controls the military and nuclear arsenal, that’s the sort of thing that the military can’t lie about without substantial risk to the country.
Let’s say the military tries to keep the keys to the nukes out of the president’s hands—by, say, giving them fake launch codes. Then they’re not just taking away the power of the president, they’re also obfuscating under which conditions the US will fire nukes. The primary purpose of nuclear weapons is to pose a clear threat to other countries, to be able to say “if these specific conditions happen (i.e. you shoot nukes at us), our government will attack you.” And the only thing that keeps someone from getting confused about those conditions and firing off a nuke at the wrong time is that other countries have a clear picture of what those conditions are, and know what to avoid.
Everyone has to be on the same page for the system to function. If the US president believes different things about when the nukes will be fired than the actual truth known to the military leaders, then you’re muddying the picture of how the nuclear deterrent works. What happens if the president threatens to nuke Russia, and the military secretly isn’t going to follow through? What happens if the president actually does give the order, and someone countermands it? Most importantly, what happens if different countries come to different conclusions about what the rules are—say, North Korea thinks the president really does have the power to launch nukes, but Russia goes through the same reasoning steps as you did, and realizes they don’t? If different people have different pictures of what’s going on, then you risk nuclear war.
And if your theory is that everyone in the upper levels of every nation’s government does know these things, even the US president, and they just don’t tell the public—well, that’s not a stable situation either. It doesn’t take long for someone to spill the truth. Suppose Trump gets told he’s not allowed to launch the nukes, and gets upset and decides to tell everyone on Truth Social. Suppose Kim learns the US president’s not allowed to launch the nukes, and decides to tell the world about that in order to discredit the US government. It’s not possible to keep a secret like that; it requires the cooperation of too many people who can’t be trusted.
A similar argument applies to a lot of the other things that one could theorize the president is secretly not allowed to do. The president’s greatest powers don’t come from having a button they can press to make something happen, they come from the public believing that they can make things happen. Let’s say the president signs a treaty to halt advanced AI development, and some other government entity wants to say, “Actually, no, we’re ignoring that and letting everyone keep developing whatever AI systems they want.” Well, how are they supposed to go about doing that? They can’t publicly say that they’re overriding the president’s order, and if they try to secretly tell major American AI labs to keep going with their research, then it doesn’t take long for a whistleblower to come forward. The moment the president signs something, then the American people believe it’s the law, and in most cases, that actually makes it become the true law.
I’d definitely want to hear suggestions as to who else in the government you think would have a lot of influence regarding this sort of thing. But the president has more influence than anyone else in the court of public opinion, and there’s very little that anyone else in the government can do to stop that.
Important caveat that should have been mentioned:
I know that civics class taught us about how the president and his advisors uses the threat of vetoing legislation to exert influence over legislation, but the vast majority of both policymaking capability and policymaking knowledge is held by domain-specific people outside the white house e.g. throughout the executive branch, such as lobbyists, natsec folk, leaders of regulator bureaucracies, etc.
Although the president and his advisors might plausibly be one of the best policy levers, their time is limited, and their interest is highly limited by the many elites in the US who spend tons of money trying to persuade the president and his advisors to care about their issue (both “persuasion” as a euphemism for bribery/lobbying, but notably literal persuasion as well).
This has been done for hundreds of years, and by now the established elites are so much better positioned than anyone adjacent to AI safety (including Altman himself), that this dynamic basically explains why presidents and their advisors aren’t interested in AI risk; they assume that, given that a policy or issue has made it all the way to their desk, odds are high that the immense optimization pressure that got it there was optimization pressure that was funded by people anticipating a probability of a return on their investment.
The president might not hold enough power to singlehandedly change everything, but they still probably have more power than pretty much any other individual. And lobbying them hasn’t been all that ineffective in the past; the AI safety crowd seems to have been involved in the original executive order. I’d expect there to be more progress if we can get a president who’s sympathetic to the cause.
None of us have solid models on how much power the president has.
The president and his advisors probably don’t actually control the nuclear arsenal; that’s probably a lie, the military probably doesn’t hand over control of the nuclear arsenal to a rando and his election campaign team every 4-8 years.
Some parts of the constitution are de-facto more respected than others; if the president and his advisors had substantial real power over the military, then both the US Natsec community and foreign intelligence agencies would be very, very heavily involved in the presidential primary process (what we’ve seen from foreign intelligence agencies so far seems more like targeting public opinion than altering the results of the election).
The president and his advisors influence over the federal legislative process is less opaque, but the details of how that works are worth massive amounts of money because it allows people to navigate the space (and the information becomes worthless if everyone knows it).
Plus, most presidents are probably far more nihilistic and self-interested in-person than in front of the cameras, and probably became hardcore conflict theorists due to being so deeply immersed in an environment where words are used as weapons (it the legislative process too, not just public opinion).
So getting a powerful president to support good AI policy would be nice, but it’s probably not worth the effort; there are other people in the executive branch with a better ratio of cost-to-access vs unambiguous policy influence.
We don’t know this either, it’s too early to tell. These institutions are extremely, extremely sophisticated at finding clever ways to make elites feel involved, when in reality the niche has already been filled by the elites who arrived first.
For example, your text makes its way into the final bill which gets passed, but the bureaucracy ignores it because it didn’t have the keywords that signal that your text is actually supposed to be enforced.
Policy influence is measured in real-world results, not effortlessly-generated stuff that looks like policy influence. And the AI safety crowd has barely even gotten their text into their bill (which primarily prioritized accelerating American AI as effectively as possible).
I’m not denying that the military and government are secretive. But there’s a difference between keeping things from the American people, and keeping them from the president. When it comes to whether the president controls the military and nuclear arsenal, that’s the sort of thing that the military can’t lie about without substantial risk to the country.
Let’s say the military tries to keep the keys to the nukes out of the president’s hands—by, say, giving them fake launch codes. Then they’re not just taking away the power of the president, they’re also obfuscating under which conditions the US will fire nukes. The primary purpose of nuclear weapons is to pose a clear threat to other countries, to be able to say “if these specific conditions happen (i.e. you shoot nukes at us), our government will attack you.” And the only thing that keeps someone from getting confused about those conditions and firing off a nuke at the wrong time is that other countries have a clear picture of what those conditions are, and know what to avoid.
Everyone has to be on the same page for the system to function. If the US president believes different things about when the nukes will be fired than the actual truth known to the military leaders, then you’re muddying the picture of how the nuclear deterrent works. What happens if the president threatens to nuke Russia, and the military secretly isn’t going to follow through? What happens if the president actually does give the order, and someone countermands it? Most importantly, what happens if different countries come to different conclusions about what the rules are—say, North Korea thinks the president really does have the power to launch nukes, but Russia goes through the same reasoning steps as you did, and realizes they don’t? If different people have different pictures of what’s going on, then you risk nuclear war.
And if your theory is that everyone in the upper levels of every nation’s government does know these things, even the US president, and they just don’t tell the public—well, that’s not a stable situation either. It doesn’t take long for someone to spill the truth. Suppose Trump gets told he’s not allowed to launch the nukes, and gets upset and decides to tell everyone on Truth Social. Suppose Kim learns the US president’s not allowed to launch the nukes, and decides to tell the world about that in order to discredit the US government. It’s not possible to keep a secret like that; it requires the cooperation of too many people who can’t be trusted.
A similar argument applies to a lot of the other things that one could theorize the president is secretly not allowed to do. The president’s greatest powers don’t come from having a button they can press to make something happen, they come from the public believing that they can make things happen. Let’s say the president signs a treaty to halt advanced AI development, and some other government entity wants to say, “Actually, no, we’re ignoring that and letting everyone keep developing whatever AI systems they want.” Well, how are they supposed to go about doing that? They can’t publicly say that they’re overriding the president’s order, and if they try to secretly tell major American AI labs to keep going with their research, then it doesn’t take long for a whistleblower to come forward. The moment the president signs something, then the American people believe it’s the law, and in most cases, that actually makes it become the true law.
I’d definitely want to hear suggestions as to who else in the government you think would have a lot of influence regarding this sort of thing. But the president has more influence than anyone else in the court of public opinion, and there’s very little that anyone else in the government can do to stop that.