That's a good question! One big difference is that the most stringent measures against covid, eg lockdowns, had annoying consequences for the general population, thus producing a backlash if not seen basically as the only option (my impression is that past the very first lockdown, where the uncertainty scared people enough, they became broadly unpopular)
My 2 comments:
1) Pausing AI research would cause minimal disturbance on the general population. It would be one of those abstract political questions some people would overstate the benefits/harm of, without big concrete observable effects for most (actually ~all) people. (this doesn't contradict your comment which made the point that there might be counter-examples to the statement "Doing something once is in general extremely helpful for doing it later times")
2) I'm not convinced we are at all "less prepared" than in 2020. It's quite unlikely the next serious pandemic is very similar to covid in terms of infectiousness profile and severity profile, so people would adapt differently depending on these parameters, and not ignore it because "covid was fine" (eg imagine if it's more dangerous to children this time). At least I would expect the public to take it more seriously in the early phase, unlike covid which was downplayed until too late to ignore. We also still have the memories of how to adapt our life to different restrictions, and that we can adapt fast. The rate of people being "science skeptical" seems to be roughly the same as before 2020, from the empirical research I saw (epistemic confidence: low)
1
I often hear people say they think we should pause AI at some point, but not yet. Their basis for this seems to be some combination of:
If we pause at the last possible moment, then we will have the most advanced AI possible during the pause, which will be helpful for doing AI safety research during the pause
Implicitly, there is some quantity of ‘pausing credit’, that will buy us a few months of pause say, and if we use them now, we won’t have them to use later, when it is important
If we pause, and then AI doesn’t seem to be at dire risk of destroying the world, maybe the public will backlash against this and it will be harder to do any kind of AI safety (especially if it has major economic consequences)
The models aren’t dangerous yet
This all sounds very questionable to me. I suggest instead that the following are at least as likely to be true:
We can’t pause on a dime at the precise second that ‘we’ decide it is important to—pulling the breaks will take a while, during which time we will continue to rocket into danger.
If we managed to pause now, that would greatly increase the chance we paused again later. At the moment, a major obstacle to people supporting this is their senses that it is impossible. Building the machinery to pause makes it much easier to pause again. Doing something once is in general extremely helpful for doing it later times—if you are taking the most important action in the world, you really don’t want to be trying it for the first time, when it matters.
The public substantially hates AI, but feels incredibly disempowered, because for instance they buy the story that technological ‘progress’ is inexorable. If they saw vividly how much power our institutions have to shape the course of technology, they would become more activated against AI.
Some of the models seem to be some amount dangerous, we can’t tell how dangerous the new ones are, they are improving very fast, and the point where we are confident that they are currently dangerous is very suboptimally late to start this project.