The EA/rationality community has struggled to identify robust interventions for mitigating existential risks from advanced artificial intelligence. In this post, I identify a new strategy for delaying the development of advanced AI while saving lives roughly 2.2 million times [-5 times, 180 billion times] as cost-effectively as leading global health interventions, known as the WAIT (Wasting AI researchers' Time) Initiative. This post will discuss the advantages of WAITing, highlight early efforts to WAIT, and address several common questions.

Theory of Change

Our high-level goal is to systematically divert AI researchers' attention away from advancing capabilities towards more mundane and time-consuming activities. This approach simultaneously (a) buys AI safety researchers time to develop more comprehensive alignment plans while also (b) directly saving millions of life-years in expectation (see our cost-effectiveness analysis below). Some examples of early interventions we're piloting include:

Bureaucratic Enhancement: Increasing administrative burden through strategic partnerships with university IRB committees and grant funding organizations. We considered further coordinating with editorial boards at academic journals but to our surprise they seem to have already enacted all of our protocol recommendations.
Militant Podcasting: Inviting leading researchers at top AI organization to come onto podcasts with enticing names like "Silicon Savants" and "IQ Infinity", ensuring each recording runs 4+ hours and requires multiple re-recordings due to technical difficulties.
Conference Question Maximization: We plan to deploy trained operatives to ask rambling, multi-part questions during Q&A sessions at leading ML conferences that begin with "This is more of a comment than a question..." and proceed until their microphones are snatched away.
Twitter/X Stupidity Farming: Our novel bots have been trained to post algorithmically optimized online discourse that consistently confuses the map for the territory. Also they won't shut up about Elon and "sexual marketplace dynamics" but apparently there is no limit to how long everyone will find these topics interesting for.
Romantic Partnership Engineering (RPE): Bay area researchers are uniquely receptive to polyamory and other relationship structures requiring increased communicatio

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