The tension wouldn’t be there if obstruction isn’t bottlenecked on discernment because discernment is easy / not too hard, but I don’t think you made that argument.
If discernment is not too hard, that’s potentially a dangerous thing: by being all discerning in a very noticeable way, you’re painting a big target on “here’s the dangerous [cool!] research”. Which is what seems to have already happened with AGI.
This is also a general problem with “just make better arguments about AI X-risk”. You can certainly make such arguments without spreading ideas about how to advance capabilities, but still, the most pointed arguments are like “look, in order to transform the world you have to do XYZ, and XYZ is dangerous because ABC”. You could maybe take the strategy of, whenever a top researcher makes a high-level proposal for how to make AGI, you can criticize that like “leaving aside whether or not that leads to AGI, if it led to AGI, here’s how that would go poorly”.
(I acknowledge that I’m being very “can’t do” in emphasis, but again, I think this pathway is crucial and worth thinking through… and therefore I want to figure out the best ways to do it!)
The tension wouldn’t be there if obstruction isn’t bottlenecked on discernment because discernment is easy / not too hard, but I don’t think you made that argument.
If discernment is not too hard, that’s potentially a dangerous thing: by being all discerning in a very noticeable way, you’re painting a big target on “here’s the dangerous [cool!] research”. Which is what seems to have already happened with AGI.
This is also a general problem with “just make better arguments about AI X-risk”. You can certainly make such arguments without spreading ideas about how to advance capabilities, but still, the most pointed arguments are like “look, in order to transform the world you have to do XYZ, and XYZ is dangerous because ABC”. You could maybe take the strategy of, whenever a top researcher makes a high-level proposal for how to make AGI, you can criticize that like “leaving aside whether or not that leads to AGI, if it led to AGI, here’s how that would go poorly”.
(I acknowledge that I’m being very “can’t do” in emphasis, but again, I think this pathway is crucial and worth thinking through… and therefore I want to figure out the best ways to do it!)