Conjecture’s Compendium is now up. It’s intended to be a relatively-complete intro to AI risk for nontechnical people who have ~zero background in the subject. I basically endorse the whole thing, and I think it’s probably the best first source to link e.g. policymakers to right now.
I might say more about it later, but for now just want to say that I think this should be the go-to source for new nontechnical people right now.
I think there’s something about Bay Area culture that can often get technical people to feel like the only valid way to contribute is through technical work. It’s higher status and sexier and there’s a default vibe that the best way to understand/improve the world is through rigorous empirical research.
I think this an incorrect (or at least incomplete) frame, and I think on-the-margin it would be good for more technical people to spend 1-5 days seriously thinking about what alternative paths they could pursue in comms/policy.
I also think there are memes spreading around that you need to be some savant political mastermind genius to do comms/policy, otherwise you will be net negative. The more I meet policy people (including successful policy people from outside the AIS bubble), the more I think this narrative was, at best, an incorrect model of the world. At worst, a take that got amplified in order to prevent people from interfering with the AGI race (e.g., by granting excess status+validity to people/ideas/frames that made it seem crazy/unilateralist/low-status to engage in public outreach, civic discourse, and policymaker engagement.)
(Caveat: I don’t think the adversarial frame explains everything, and I do think there are lots of people who were genuinely trying to reason about a complex world and just ended up underestimating how much policy interest there would be and/or overestimating the extent to which labs would be able to take useful actions despite the pressures of race dynamics.)
One of the common arguments in favor of investing more resources into current governance approaches (e.g., evals, if-then plans, RSPs) is that there’s nothing else we can do.There’s not a better alternative– these are the only things that labs and governments are currently willing to support.
The Compendium argues that there are other (valuable) things that people can do, with most of these actions focusing on communicating about AGI risks. Examples:
Share a link to this Compendium online or with friends, and provide your feedback on which ideas are correct and which are unconvincing. This is a living document, and your suggestions will shape our arguments.
Post your views on AGI risk to social media, explaining why you believe it to be a legitimate problem (or not).
Red-team companies’ plans to deal with AI risk, and call them out publicly if they do not have a legible plan.
One possible critique is that their suggestions are not particularly ambitious. This is likely because they’re writing for a broader audience (people who haven’t been deeply engaged in AI safety).
For people who have been deeply engaged in AI safety, I think the natural steelman here is “focus on helping the public/government better understand the AI risk situation.”
There are at least some impactful and high-status examples of this (e.g., Hinton, Bengio, Hendrycks). I think in the last few years, for instance, most people would agree that Hinton/Bengio/Hendrycks have had far more impact in their communications/outreach/policy work than their technical research work.
And it’s not just the famous people– I can think of ~10 junior or mid-career people who left technical research in the last year to help policymakers better understand AI progress and AI risk, and I think their work is likely far more impactful than if they had stayed in technical research. (And I’m even excluding people who are working on evals/if-then plans: like, I’m focusing on people who see their primary purpose as helping the public or policymakers develop “situational awareness”, develop stronger models of AI progress and AI risk, understand the conceptual arguments for misalignment risk, etc.)
I appreciated their section on AI governance. The “if-then”/RSP/preparedness frame has become popular, and they directly argue for why they oppose this direction. (I’m a fan of preparedness efforts– especially on the government level– but I think it’s worth engaging with the counterarguments.)
Pasting some content from their piece below.
High-level thesis against current AI governance efforts:
The majority of existing AI safety efforts are reactive rather than proactive, which inherently puts humanity in the position of managing risk rather than controlling AI development and preventing it.
Critique of reactive frameworks:
1. The reactive framework reverses the burden of proof from how society typically regulates high-risk technologies and industries.
In most areas of law, we do not wait for harm to occur before implementing safeguards. Banks are prohibited from facilitating money laundering from the moment of incorporation, not after their first offense. Nuclear power plants must demonstrate safety measures before operation, not after a meltdown.
The reactive framework problematically reverses the burden of proof. It assumes AI systems are safe by default and only requires action once risks are detected. One of the core dangers of AI systems is precisely that we do not know what they will do or how powerful they will be before we train them. The if-then framework opts to proceed until problems arise, rather than pausing development and deployment until we can guarantee safety. This implicitly endorses the current race to AGI.
This reversal is exactly what makes the reactive framework preferable for AI companies.
Critique of waiting for warning shots:
3. The reactive framework incorrectly assumes that an AI “warning shot” will motivate coordination.
Imagine an extreme situation in which an AI disaster serves as a “warning shot” for humanity. This would imply that powerful AI has been developed and that we have months (or less) to develop safety measures or pause further development. After a certain point, an actor with sufficiently advanced AI may be ungovernable, and misaligned AI may be uncontrollable.
When horrible things happen, people do not suddenly become rational. In the face of an AI disaster, we should expect chaos, adversariality, and fear to be the norm, making coordination very difficult. The useful time to facilitate coordination is before disaster strikes.
However, the reactive framework assumes that this is essentially how we will build consensus in order to regulate AI. The optimistic case is that we hit a dangerous threshold before a real AI disaster, alerting humanity to the risks. But history shows that it is exactly in such moments that these thresholds are most contested –- this shifting of the goalposts is known as the AI Effect and common enough to have its own Wikipedia page. Time and again, AI advancements have been explained away as routine processes, whereas “real AI” is redefined to be some mystical threshold we have not yet reached. Dangerous capabilities are similarly contested as they arise, such as how recent reports of OpenAI’s o1 being deceptive have been questioned.
This will become increasingly common as competitors build increasingly powerful capabilities and approach their goal of building AGI. Universally, powerful stakeholders fight for their narrow interests, and for maintaining the status quo, and they often win, even when all of society is going to lose. Big Tobacco didn’t pause cigarette-making when they learned about lung cancer; instead they spread misinformation and hired lobbyists. Big Oil didn’t pause drilling when they learned about climate change; instead they spread misinformation and hired lobbyists. Likewise, now that billions of dollars are pouring into the creation of AGI and superintelligence, we’ve already seen competitors fight tooth and nail to keep building. If problems arise in the future, of course they will fight for their narrow interests, just as industries always do. And as the AI industry gets larger, more entrenched, and more essential over time, this problem will grow rapidly worse.
Conjecture’s Compendium is now up. It’s intended to be a relatively-complete intro to AI risk for nontechnical people who have ~zero background in the subject. I basically endorse the whole thing, and I think it’s probably the best first source to link e.g. policymakers to right now.
I might say more about it later, but for now just want to say that I think this should be the go-to source for new nontechnical people right now.
I think there’s something about Bay Area culture that can often get technical people to feel like the only valid way to contribute is through technical work. It’s higher status and sexier and there’s a default vibe that the best way to understand/improve the world is through rigorous empirical research.
I think this an incorrect (or at least incomplete) frame, and I think on-the-margin it would be good for more technical people to spend 1-5 days seriously thinking about what alternative paths they could pursue in comms/policy.
I also think there are memes spreading around that you need to be some savant political mastermind genius to do comms/policy, otherwise you will be net negative. The more I meet policy people (including successful policy people from outside the AIS bubble), the more I think this narrative was, at best, an incorrect model of the world. At worst, a take that got amplified in order to prevent people from interfering with the AGI race (e.g., by granting excess status+validity to people/ideas/frames that made it seem crazy/unilateralist/low-status to engage in public outreach, civic discourse, and policymaker engagement.)
(Caveat: I don’t think the adversarial frame explains everything, and I do think there are lots of people who were genuinely trying to reason about a complex world and just ended up underestimating how much policy interest there would be and/or overestimating the extent to which labs would be able to take useful actions despite the pressures of race dynamics.)
One of the common arguments in favor of investing more resources into current governance approaches (e.g., evals, if-then plans, RSPs) is that there’s nothing else we can do. There’s not a better alternative– these are the only things that labs and governments are currently willing to support.
The Compendium argues that there are other (valuable) things that people can do, with most of these actions focusing on communicating about AGI risks. Examples:
One possible critique is that their suggestions are not particularly ambitious. This is likely because they’re writing for a broader audience (people who haven’t been deeply engaged in AI safety).
For people who have been deeply engaged in AI safety, I think the natural steelman here is “focus on helping the public/government better understand the AI risk situation.”
There are at least some impactful and high-status examples of this (e.g., Hinton, Bengio, Hendrycks). I think in the last few years, for instance, most people would agree that Hinton/Bengio/Hendrycks have had far more impact in their communications/outreach/policy work than their technical research work.
And it’s not just the famous people– I can think of ~10 junior or mid-career people who left technical research in the last year to help policymakers better understand AI progress and AI risk, and I think their work is likely far more impactful than if they had stayed in technical research. (And I’m even excluding people who are working on evals/if-then plans: like, I’m focusing on people who see their primary purpose as helping the public or policymakers develop “situational awareness”, develop stronger models of AI progress and AI risk, understand the conceptual arguments for misalignment risk, etc.)
I appreciated their section on AI governance. The “if-then”/RSP/preparedness frame has become popular, and they directly argue for why they oppose this direction. (I’m a fan of preparedness efforts– especially on the government level– but I think it’s worth engaging with the counterarguments.)
Pasting some content from their piece below.
High-level thesis against current AI governance efforts:
Critique of reactive frameworks:
Critique of waiting for warning shots:
My own attempt is much less well written and comprehensive, but I think I hit on some points that theirs misses: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NRZfxAJztvx2ES5LG/a-path-to-human-autonomy
I like it. I do worry that it, and The Narrow Path, are both missing how hard it will be to govern and restrict AI.