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you need to dig a trench and you only have spoons. but you know that tomorrow the excavators will arrive. what should you do? it seems like you should be doing anything other than digging. you should be checking there's enough diesel, and the excavators have a clear path to the site, and everyone knows how to operate the excavators, etc.
developing ai safety techniques seems worse currently than increasing the political will to implement safety techniques
I don't think these are remotely the same skillsets. I don't have much experience talking with ai safety researchers, since there aren't particularly many here in Australia; but if they're anything like mathematicians I think a decent chunk have mental hardware which makes them differentially far better at research than politicing.
Maybe some parts of the trench require really fine detail work which the excavators will be bad at, so you should try to use your spoons to get started on those parts before the excavators arrive.
13Cole Wyeth
what about strengthening the scientific consensus that ai is unsafe?
AI safety is not all about techniques.