Even if competitiveness is likely tractable, we might have more influence over some worlds where competitiveness is intractable. I don’t think this overwhelms a large disagreement about tractability of a fully competitive alignment solution, but I think there’s something valuable about how pivotal act plans work under the weakest assumptions about alignment difficulty.
If powerful AIs are deployed in worlds mostly shaped by slightly less powerful AIs, you basically need competitiveness to be able to take any “pivotal action” because all the free energy will have been eaten by less powerful AIs.
Even if competitiveness is likely tractable, we might have more influence over some worlds where competitiveness is intractable. I don’t think this overwhelms a large disagreement about tractability of a fully competitive alignment solution, but I think there’s something valuable about how pivotal act plans work under the weakest assumptions about alignment difficulty.
If powerful AIs are deployed in worlds mostly shaped by slightly less powerful AIs, you basically need competitiveness to be able to take any “pivotal action” because all the free energy will have been eaten by less powerful AIs.