I think the framing of “convince leading AI researchers to willingly work more closely with AI alignment researchers, and think about the problem more themselves” is the better goal. I don’t think hampering them generally is particularly useful/effective, and I don’t think convincing them entirely to “AGI is very scary” is likely either.
This is such a weird sentiment to me. I hear it a lot, and predicated on similar beliefs about AGI I feel like it’s missing a mood. If someone were missassembling a bomb inside a children’s hospital, would you still say “hampering them generally isn’t particularly useful/effective”? Would your objective be to get them to “think more about the problem themselves”? There’s a lack of urgency in these suggestions that seems unnatural. The overarching instrumental goal is to get them to stop.
I just expect much better outcomes from the path of close collaboration. To me it seems like I am a “nuclear power plant safety engineer”, and they are the “nuclear power plant core criticality engineers”. Preventing the power plant from getting built would mean it wasn’t built unsafely, but since I believe that would leave a void in which someone else would be strongly inclined to build their version… I just see the best likelihood of good outcome in the paths near ‘we work together to build the safest version we can’.
I think the framing of “convince leading AI researchers to willingly work more closely with AI alignment researchers, and think about the problem more themselves” is the better goal. I don’t think hampering them generally is particularly useful/effective, and I don’t think convincing them entirely to “AGI is very scary” is likely either.
This is such a weird sentiment to me. I hear it a lot, and predicated on similar beliefs about AGI I feel like it’s missing a mood. If someone were missassembling a bomb inside a children’s hospital, would you still say “hampering them generally isn’t particularly useful/effective”? Would your objective be to get them to “think more about the problem themselves”? There’s a lack of urgency in these suggestions that seems unnatural. The overarching instrumental goal is to get them to stop.
I just expect much better outcomes from the path of close collaboration. To me it seems like I am a “nuclear power plant safety engineer”, and they are the “nuclear power plant core criticality engineers”. Preventing the power plant from getting built would mean it wasn’t built unsafely, but since I believe that would leave a void in which someone else would be strongly inclined to build their version… I just see the best likelihood of good outcome in the paths near ‘we work together to build the safest version we can’.