Two days after publishing this post, we decided that the tone was unhelpfully combative. We stand by our views, but we made edits to make the tone less combative, and we removed two items from the list of false representations. You can see a diff here.

This criticism of AI 2040: Plan A by Séb Krier unfortunately seriously mischaracterizes our proposal. While we appreciate constructive criticisms of Plan A, such as the ones by Tom Davidson, Richard Ngo, and 1a3orn, we feel the need to correct the issues in Séb’s response. First, we’ll go over the specific false representations, and then we’ll give a point-by-point response.

False Representations

I’m not claiming you shouldn’t prepare and improvise in the dark, but rather that this version of preparing bakes in too much and leaves little space for the effective but uncomfortable trial-and-effort that real life requires.

The exact opposite is true. Plan A is extremely iterative. In the status quo, there is trial and error, but ultimately companies aren’t going to choose the safer or more societally beneficial path, they are going to choose what the market wants. In Plan A there is much more time for AI companies to gain evidence and for governments to respond reasonably to the sweeping changes. Thanks to total transparency and broad deployment, all of this evidence is accessible to academics, independent researchers, and the public instead of being sealed away in the labs where only lab insiders can see it. Our plan maximizes learning and room to experiment.

I think it gets a lot of economics wrong. It reifies a number of views common amongst Bay Area technologists, which include (a) extremely fast diffusion and societal transformation, (b) a view that all profits accrue maximally to the labs, (c) that the prescriptions advanced in the essay (like expropriations and forced IP diffusion) have minimal impacts on said profits; (d) the claim that you get explosive GDP growth very soon, (e) that ‘de facto’ nationalisation and profit redistribution through UBI is an optimal response.

Much of this is wrong. Specifically, we believe: (b) not all profits will accrue to labs,^[1] (c) that Plan A would significantly decrease lab profits,^[2] and (e) ‘de facto’ nationalization is not an optimal response.^[3]

The authors themselves note that “there isn’t a central planner with authority to regulate AI worldwide” as a fundamental i

...