(Cross comment from EAF) Thank you for making the effort to write this post.
Reading Situational Awareness, I updated pretty hardcore into national security as the probable most successful future path, and now find myself a little chastened by your piece, haha [and just went around looking at other responses too, but yours was first and I think it’s the most lit/evidence-based]. I think I bought into the “Other” argument for China and authoritarianism, and the ideal scenario of being ahead in a short timeline world so that you don’t have to even concern yourself with difficult coordination, or even war, if it happens fast enough.
I appreciated learning about macrosecuritization and Sears’ thesis, if I’m a good scholar I should also look into Sears’ historical case studies of national securitization being inferior to macrosecuritization.
Other notes for me from your article included: Leopold’s pretty bad handwaviness around pausing as simply, “not the way”, his unwillingness to engage with alternative paths, the danger (and his benefit) of his narrative dominating, and national security actually being more at risk in the scenario where someone is threatening to escape mutually assured destruction. I appreciated the note that safety researchers were pushed out of/disincentivized in the Manhattan Project early and later disempowered further, and that a national security program would probably perpetuate itself even with a lead.
FWIW I think Leopold also comes to the table with a different background and set of assumptions, and I’m confused about this but charitably: I think he does genuinely believe China is the bigger threat versus the intelligence explosion, I don’t think he intentionally frames the Other as China to diminish macrosecuritization in the face of AI risk. See next note for more, but yes, again, I agree his piece doesn’t have good epistemics when it comes to exploring alternatives, like a pause, and he seems to be doing his darnedest narratively to say the path he describes is The Way (even capitalizing words like this), but...
One additional aspect of Leopold’s beliefs that I don’t believe is present in your current version of this piece, is that Leopold makes a pretty explicit claim that alignment is solvable and furthermore believes that it could be solved in a matter of months, from p. 101 of Situational Awareness:
Moreover, even if the US squeaks out ahead in the end, the difference between a 1-2 year and 1-2 month lead will really matter for navigating the perils of superintelligence. A 1-2 year lead means at least a reasonable margin to get safety right, and to navigate the extremely volatile period around the intelligence explosion and post-superintelligence.77 [NOTE] 77 E.g., space to take an extra 6 months during the intelligence explosion for alignment research to make sure superintelligence doesn’t go awry, time to stabilize the situation after the invention of some novel WMDs by directing these systems to focus on defensive applications, or simply time for human decision-makers to make the right decisions given an extraordinarily rapid pace of technological change with the advent of superintelligence.
I think this is genuinely a crux he has with the ‘doomers’, and to a lesser extent the AI safety community in general. He seems highly confident that AI risk is solvable (and will benefit from gov coordination), contingent on there being enough of a lead (which requires us to go faster to produce that lead) and good security (again, increase the lead).
Finally, I’m sympathetic to Leopold writing about the government as better than corporations to be in charge here (and I think the current rate of AI scaling makes this at some point likely (hit proto-natsec level capability before x-risk capability, maybe this plays out on the model gen release schedule)) and his emphasis on security itself seems pretty robustly good (I can thank him for introducing me to the idea of North Korea walking away with AGI weights). Also just the writing is pretty excellent.
(Cross comment from EAF)
Thank you for making the effort to write this post.
Reading Situational Awareness, I updated pretty hardcore into national security as the probable most successful future path, and now find myself a little chastened by your piece, haha [and just went around looking at other responses too, but yours was first and I think it’s the most lit/evidence-based]. I think I bought into the “Other” argument for China and authoritarianism, and the ideal scenario of being ahead in a short timeline world so that you don’t have to even concern yourself with difficult coordination, or even war, if it happens fast enough.
I appreciated learning about macrosecuritization and Sears’ thesis, if I’m a good scholar I should also look into Sears’ historical case studies of national securitization being inferior to macrosecuritization.
Other notes for me from your article included: Leopold’s pretty bad handwaviness around pausing as simply, “not the way”, his unwillingness to engage with alternative paths, the danger (and his benefit) of his narrative dominating, and national security actually being more at risk in the scenario where someone is threatening to escape mutually assured destruction. I appreciated the note that safety researchers were pushed out of/disincentivized in the Manhattan Project early and later disempowered further, and that a national security program would probably perpetuate itself even with a lead.
FWIW I think Leopold also comes to the table with a different background and set of assumptions, and I’m confused about this but charitably: I think he does genuinely believe China is the bigger threat versus the intelligence explosion, I don’t think he intentionally frames the Other as China to diminish macrosecuritization in the face of AI risk. See next note for more, but yes, again, I agree his piece doesn’t have good epistemics when it comes to exploring alternatives, like a pause, and he seems to be doing his darnedest narratively to say the path he describes is The Way (even capitalizing words like this), but...
One additional aspect of Leopold’s beliefs that I don’t believe is present in your current version of this piece, is that Leopold makes a pretty explicit claim that alignment is solvable and furthermore believes that it could be solved in a matter of months, from p. 101 of Situational Awareness:
I think this is genuinely a crux he has with the ‘doomers’, and to a lesser extent the AI safety community in general. He seems highly confident that AI risk is solvable (and will benefit from gov coordination), contingent on there being enough of a lead (which requires us to go faster to produce that lead) and good security (again, increase the lead).
Finally, I’m sympathetic to Leopold writing about the government as better than corporations to be in charge here (and I think the current rate of AI scaling makes this at some point likely (hit proto-natsec level capability before x-risk capability, maybe this plays out on the model gen release schedule)) and his emphasis on security itself seems pretty robustly good (I can thank him for introducing me to the idea of North Korea walking away with AGI weights). Also just the writing is pretty excellent.