Society really cares about safety. Practically speaking, the binding constraint on deploying your AGI could well be your ability to align your AGI. Solving (scalable) alignment might be worth lots of $$$ and key to beating China.

Look, I really don't want Xi Jinping Thought to rule the world. If China gets AGI first, the ensuing rapid AI-powered scientific and technological progress could well give it a decisive advantage (cf potential for >30%/year economic growth with AGI). I think there's a very real specter of global authoritarianism here.^[1]

Or hey, maybe you just think AGI is cool. You want to go build amazing products and enable breakthrough science and solve the world’s problems.

So, race to AGI with reckless abandon then? At this point, people get into agonizing discussions about safety tradeoffs.^[2] And many people just mood affiliate their way to an answer: "accelerate, progress go brrrr," or "AI scary, slow it down."

I see this much more practically. And, practically, society cares about safety, a lot. Do you actually think that you’ll be able to and allowed to deploy an AI system that has, say, a 10% chance of destroying all of humanity?^[3]

Society has started waking up to AGI; like covid, the societal response will probably be a dumpster-fire, but it’ll also probably be quite intense. In many worlds, to deploy your AGI systems, people will need to be quite confident that your AGI won’t destroy the world.

Right now, we’re very much not on track to solve the alignment problem for superhuman AGI systems (“scalable alignment”)—but it’s a solvable problem, if we get our act together. I discuss this in my main post today (“Nobody’s on the ball on AGI alignment”). On the current trajectory, the binding constraint on deploying your AGI could well be your ability to align your AGI—and this alignment solution being unambiguous enough that there is consensus that it works.

Even if you just want to win the AGI race, you should probably want to invest much more heavily in solving this problem.

Things are going to get crazy, and people will pay attention

A mistake many people make when thinking about AGI is imagining a world that looks much like today, except for adding in a lab with a super powerful model. They ignore the endogenous societal response.

I and many others made this mistake with covid—we were freaking out in February 2020, and des...

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