(Note, this post seems to have been originally published roughly a year ago, and so my reply here might be responding to an out-of-date argument.)

Slow down AI with stupid regulations

I guess I'm just much more optimistic than most people here that slowing down AI via regulations is the default, reasonable path that we should expect society to take in the absence of further interventions from longtermists. The reason for my belief has perhaps become more apparent in the last six months, but it's worth repeating. My argument is built on a few simple premises:

1. Most people aren't excited about the idea of transformative AI radically upending human life, and so will demand regulations if they think that transformative AI is imminent. I expect regulations to focus on mitigating harms from job losses, making sure the systems are reliable, and ensuring that powerful models can't be exploited by terrorists.
2. AI will get gradually more powerful over the course of years, rather than being hidden in the background until suddenly godlike AI appears and reshapes the world. In these years, the technology will be rolled out on a large scale, resulting in most people (especially tech-focused young people) recognizing that these technologies are becoming powerful.
3. AIs will be relatively easy to regulate in the short-term, since AI progress is currently largely maintained by scaling compute budgets, and large AI supercomputers are easy to monitor. GPU production is highly centralized, and it is almost trivial for governments to limit production, which would raise prices, delaying AI.

Given that we're probably going to get regulations by default, I care much more about ensuring that our regulations are thoughtful and well-targeted. I'm averse to trying to push for any regulations whatsoever because that's "the best hope we have". I don't think stupid regulations are the best hope we have, and moreover, locking in stupid regulations could make the situation even worse!

Well written post that will hopefully stir up some good discussion :)

My impression is that LW/EA people prefer to avoid conflict, and when conflict is necessary don't want to use misleading arguments/tactics (with BS regulations seen as such).

Agreed. Maybe the blocker here is that LW/EA people don't have many contacts in public policy, and are much more familiar with tech.

To be frank, I think the main reason this approach hasn't been strongly tried is because most AI alignment enthusiasts are asocial nerds, who don't know how to / are uncomfortable with trying to emotionally manipulate people in the ways needed for successful anti-AI propaganda. We need a ruthless PR team as effective as a presidential campaign staff, badly.

I'd also like to point out that most of the major players here are big tech companies which a large portion of the population already distrusts, and conservatives in particular could easily be swayed against them by leveraging their anti-elitist and anti-academic sentiments. But, again, most AI alignment enthusiasts are liberals and do not necessarily understand or respect the intelligence of conservatives, who are the ones most likely to actually recognize the danger and care, because conserving the status quo is literally what they do. Suppose we got Trump supporters on our side. This thought probably makes you itch; but it would pack a punch.

The main problem there, of course, is that the moment conservatives become anti something, liberals react by becoming even more vehemently pro it, and vice versa. I'm not sure how to navigate that, but we can't simply ignore half the world and their potential support.

Prototype conservative rant:

We all know that Silicon Valley elites and their Russian and Chinese comrades use social media platforms to callously manipulate our children, turn honest, hardworking Americans against each other, and destroy the foundations of our democracy, all to pad their pockets.

But did you know they're also working to build artificial general intelligences - unfeeling mockeries of humanity, with no goal except to maximize profit, regardless of what innocent people they have to step on? If these criminal scum are allowed to continue playing God and successfully create some kind of sentient computer life, who knows what kinds of demonic forces could be unleashed upon our world?

It's our responsibility as patriots to oppose these companies every way we can, and use the full force of our democracy - and the market, voting with our dollars - to remind them to think twice before treading on the American people.

There are actually a decent number of people working on slowing it down now. Have you seen the AGI Moratorium Slack or the Pause.AI Discord? These are the main hub of activity for slowing down AGI.

Strongly tying AI safety to wokeness in the mind of the public seems like a high-risk strategy, especially with the possibility of a backlash against wokism in the US - the baby might be thrown out with the bathwater.

Thanks for the post - I think there are some ways heavy regulation of AI could be very counterproductive or ineffective for safety:

• If AI progress slows down enough in countries were safety-concerned people are especially influential, then these countries (and their companies) will fall behind in international AI development. This would eliminate much/most of safety-concerned people's opportunities for impacting how AI goes.
• If China "catches up" to the US in AI (due to US over-regulation) when AI is looking increasingly economically and militarily important, that could easily motivate US lawmakers to hit the gas on AI (which would at least undo some of the earlier slowing down of AI, and would at worst spark an international race to the bottom on AI).

Also, you mention,

The community strategy (insofar as there even is one) is to bet everything on getting a couple of technical alignment folks onto the team at top research labs in the hopes that they will miraculously solve alignment before the mad scientists in the office next door turn on the doomsday machine.

From conversation, my understanding is some governance/policy folks fortunately have (somewhat) more promising ideas than that. (This doesn't show up much on this site, partly because: people on here tend to not be as interested in governance, these professionals tend to be busy, the ideas are fairly rough, and getting the optics right can be more important for governance ideas.) I hear there's some work aimed at posting about some of these ideas - until then, chatting with people (e.g., by reaching out to people at conferences) might be the best way to learn about these ideas.

Hire think tanks to write white papers about the harm caused by poorly designed, quickly deployed AI systems.

Take advantage of the inevitable fuck-ups and disasters caused by narrow AI to press leaders for tighter regulations and more bureaucracy

These two ideas seem the closest to being reasonable strategies. I'd like to see think tanks prepare now for what to recommend if something triggers public demand for doing something about AI.

I share your concerns, as do some people I know. I also feel like thoughts along these lines have become more common in the community over the past few months, but nobody I was aware of had yet tried to take steps to do something about it and take the first steps to try and galvanise a new effort on AGI risk outreach.

So we did: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/DS3frSuoNynzvjet4/agi-safety-communications-initiative

We're not sure yet what we're aiming for exactly, but we all think that current efforts at communicating AGI risk to the wider world are lacking, and we need AGI danger to be widely understood and politically planned for, like climate change is. 

Personally, I'd like for our efforts to end up creating something like a new umbrella EA org specialised in wide outreach on AGI risk, from grand strategy conceptualising to planning and carrying out concrete campaigns to networking existing outreach efforts.

This isn't 2012. AGI isn't as far mode as it used to be. You can show people systems like PaLM, and how good their language understanding and reasoning capabilities are getting. I think that while it may be very hard, normal people could indeed be made to see that this is going somewhere dangerous, so long as their jobs do not directly depend on believing otherwise. 

If you'd like to join up, do follow the link.

Hell, Germany just shut down their remaining nuclear power plants during the middle of an energy crisis because of a bunch of misguided idiots from the green party think nuclear power is unsafe. They managed to convince government officials to shut down operational nuclear plants and replace the with coal-fired power plants using coal [SUPPLIED BY RUSSIA.](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/05/business/germany-russia-oil-gas-coal.html)

If we consider that the thing in this example analogous to AI might not be "nuclear power" but rather "electricity generation", then this could demonstrate stupid regulations impairing one form of a technology but thereby giving a relative advantage to a form of the technology which is more dangerous but in a way which is less visible to the stupid regulations.

Fascinating. When you put it like this (particularly when you include the different argument to conservatives), slowing down progress seems relatively easy.

I think this approach will get pushback, but even more likely just mostly be ignored (by default) by the rationalist community because our values create an ugh field that steers us away from thinking about this approach.

Rationalists hate lying.

I hate it myself. The idea of putting lots of effort into a publicity campaign that misrepresents my real concerns sounds absolutely horrible.

What about an approach in which we present those concerns without claiming they're the only concern? (and sort of downplaying the extent to which actual x-risk from agi is the main concern)?

I do care about bias in AI; it's a real and unjust thing that will probably keep growing. And I'm actually fairly worried that job loss from AI could be so severe as to wreck most people's lives (even people with jobs may have friends and family that are suddenly homeless). It may be so disruptive as to make the path to AGI even more dangerous by putting it in a cultural milieu of desperation.

The main problems with this approach are the "what about China?" question, and the problem of creating polarization by aligning the argument with one of the existing political tribes in the US. Simultaneously presenting arguments that appeal to liberals and conservatives might prevent that.

The remaining question is how more regulation might actually harm our chances of winding up with aligned AGI. There have been some good points raised about how that could potentially turn alignment teams into regulation-satisfying teams, and how it could prevent alignment-focused research, but it seems like that would take more analysis.

I believe that the general consensus is that it is impossible to totally pause AI development due to Molochian concerns: I am like you, and if I could press a button to send us back to 2017 levels of AI technology, I would.

However, in the current situation, the intelligent people as you noted have found ways to convince themselves to take on a very high risk of humanity and the general coordination of humanity is not enough to convince them otherwise.

There have some positive updates but it seems that we have not been in a world of general sanity and safety at this scale.

I have taken solace in the morbid amusement that many of the "powers that be" may indeed be dying with us, but they are quite blind.

"Humanity: extinct due to hyperbolic discounting behavior."