On the wait-and-see attitude, which is maybe the more important part of your point:
I agree that a lot of people are taking a wait-and-see-what-we-actually-create stance. I don’t think that’s a good idea with something this important. I think we should be doing our damndest to predict what it will be like and what should be done about it while there’s still a little spare time. Many of those predictions will be wrong, but they will at least produce some analysis of what the sane actions are in different scenarios of the type of AGI we create. And as we get closer, some of the predictions might be right enough to actually help with alignment plans. I share Max’s conviction that we have a pretty good guess at the form the first AGIs will take on the current trajectory.
On the wait-and-see attitude, which is maybe the more important part of your point:
I agree that a lot of people are taking a wait-and-see-what-we-actually-create stance. I don’t think that’s a good idea with something this important. I think we should be doing our damndest to predict what it will be like and what should be done about it while there’s still a little spare time. Many of those predictions will be wrong, but they will at least produce some analysis of what the sane actions are in different scenarios of the type of AGI we create. And as we get closer, some of the predictions might be right enough to actually help with alignment plans. I share Max’s conviction that we have a pretty good guess at the form the first AGIs will take on the current trajectory.