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.
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: