we should be very sceptical of interventions whose first-order effects aren’t promising.
This seems reasonable, but I think this suspicion is currently applied too liberally. In general, it seems like second-order effects are often very large. For instance, some AI safety research is currently funded by a billionaire whose path to impact on AI safety was to start a cryptocurrency exchange. I’ve written about the general distaste for diffuse effects and how that might be damaging here; if you disagree I’d love to hear your response.
In general, I don’t think it makes sense to compare policy to plastic straws, because I think you can easily crunch the numbers and find that plastic straws are a very small part of the problem. I don’t think it’s even remotely the case that “policy is a very small part of the problem” since in a more cooperative world I think we would be far more prudent with respect to AI development (that’s not to say policy is tractable, just that it seems very much more difficult to dismiss than straws).
This seems reasonable, but I think this suspicion is currently applied too liberally. In general, it seems like second-order effects are often very large. For instance, some AI safety research is currently funded by a billionaire whose path to impact on AI safety was to start a cryptocurrency exchange. I’ve written about the general distaste for diffuse effects and how that might be damaging here; if you disagree I’d love to hear your response.
In general, I don’t think it makes sense to compare policy to plastic straws, because I think you can easily crunch the numbers and find that plastic straws are a very small part of the problem. I don’t think it’s even remotely the case that “policy is a very small part of the problem” since in a more cooperative world I think we would be far more prudent with respect to AI development (that’s not to say policy is tractable, just that it seems very much more difficult to dismiss than straws).