If you think that Anthropic and other labs that adopt these are fundamentally well meaning and trying to do the right thing, you’ll assume that we are by default heading down path #1. If you are more cynical about how companies are acting, then #2 may seem more plausible.
I disagree that what you think about a lab’s internal motivations should be very relevant here. For any particular lab/government adopting any particular RSP, you can just ask, does having this RSP make it easier or harder to implement future good legislation? My sense is that the answer to that question should mostly depend on whether the substance of the RSP is actually better-than-nothing or not, and what your general models of politics are, rather than any facts about people’s internal motivations—especially since trying to externally judge the motivation of a company with huge PR resources is a fundamentally fraught thing to do.
Furthermore, my sense is that, most of the time, the crux here tends to be more around models of how politics works. If you think that there’s only a very narrow policy window to get in some policy and if you get the wrong policy in you miss your shot, then you won’t be willing to accept an RSP that is good but insufficient on its own. I tend to refer to this as the “resource mindset”—you’re thinking of political influence, policy windows, etc. as a limited resource to be spent wisely. My sense, though, is that the resource mindset is just wrong when applied to politics—the right mindset, I think, is a positive-sum mindset, where small better-than-nothing policy actions yield larger, even-better-than-nothing policy actions, until eventually you build up to something sufficient.
Certainly I could imagine situations where an RSP is crafted in such a way as to try to stymie future regulation, though I think doing so is actually quite hard:
Governments have sovereignty, so you can’t just restrict what they’ll do in the future.
Once a regulatory organization exists for something, it’s very easy to just give it more tasks, make it stricter, etc., and much harder to get rid of it, so the existence of previous regulation generally makes new regulation easier not harder.
At least in democracies, leaders regularly come and go, and tend to like to get their new thing passed without caring that much about repealing the old thing, so different overlapping regulations can easily pile up.
Of course, that’s not to say that we shouldn’t still ask for RSPs that make future regulation even more likely to be good, e.g. by:
Not overclaiming about what sort of stuff is measurable (e.g. not trying to formalize simple metrics for alignment that will be insufficient).
Leaving open clear and obvious holes to be filled later by future regulation.
I disagree that what you think about a lab’s internal motivations should be very relevant here. For any particular lab/government adopting any particular RSP, you can just ask, does having this RSP make it easier or harder to implement future good legislation? My sense is that the answer to that question should mostly depend on whether the substance of the RSP is actually better-than-nothing or not, and what your general models of politics are, rather than any facts about people’s internal motivations—especially since trying to externally judge the motivation of a company with huge PR resources is a fundamentally fraught thing to do.
Furthermore, my sense is that, most of the time, the crux here tends to be more around models of how politics works. If you think that there’s only a very narrow policy window to get in some policy and if you get the wrong policy in you miss your shot, then you won’t be willing to accept an RSP that is good but insufficient on its own. I tend to refer to this as the “resource mindset”—you’re thinking of political influence, policy windows, etc. as a limited resource to be spent wisely. My sense, though, is that the resource mindset is just wrong when applied to politics—the right mindset, I think, is a positive-sum mindset, where small better-than-nothing policy actions yield larger, even-better-than-nothing policy actions, until eventually you build up to something sufficient.
Certainly I could imagine situations where an RSP is crafted in such a way as to try to stymie future regulation, though I think doing so is actually quite hard:
Governments have sovereignty, so you can’t just restrict what they’ll do in the future.
Once a regulatory organization exists for something, it’s very easy to just give it more tasks, make it stricter, etc., and much harder to get rid of it, so the existence of previous regulation generally makes new regulation easier not harder.
At least in democracies, leaders regularly come and go, and tend to like to get their new thing passed without caring that much about repealing the old thing, so different overlapping regulations can easily pile up.
Of course, that’s not to say that we shouldn’t still ask for RSPs that make future regulation even more likely to be good, e.g. by:
Not overclaiming about what sort of stuff is measurable (e.g. not trying to formalize simple metrics for alignment that will be insufficient).
Leaving open clear and obvious holes to be filled later by future regulation.
etc.