I doubt many of them would say “I would be in favor of a pause if it meant that the US stopped doing AI development and we completely ceded the race to China.” I would suspect many of them might say something like “I would be in favor of a pause in which the US sees if China is down to cooperate, but if China is not down to cooperate, then I would be in favor of the US lifting the pause.”
FWIW, I don’t think this super tracks my model here. My model is “Ideally, if China is not down to cooperate, the U.S. threatens conventional escalation in order to get China to slow down as well, while being very transparent about not planning to develop AGI itself”.
Political feasibility of this does seem low, but it seems valuable and important to be clear about what a relatively ideal policy would be, and honestly, I don’t think it’s an implausible outcome (I think AGI is terrifying and as that becomes more obvious it seems totally plausible for the U.S. to threaten escalation towards China if they are developing vastly superior weapons of mass destruction while staying away from the technology themselves).
FWIW, I don’t think this super tracks my model here. My model is “Ideally, if China is not down to cooperate, the U.S. threatens conventional escalation in order to get China to slow down as well, while being very transparent about not planning to develop AGI itself”.
Political feasibility of this does seem low, but it seems valuable and important to be clear about what a relatively ideal policy would be, and honestly, I don’t think it’s an implausible outcome (I think AGI is terrifying and as that becomes more obvious it seems totally plausible for the U.S. to threaten escalation towards China if they are developing vastly superior weapons of mass destruction while staying away from the technology themselves).