I don’t think that making alignment a partisan issue is a likely outcome. The president’s actions would be executive guidance for a few agencies. This sort of thing often reflects partisan ideology, but doesn’t cause it. And Yang hasn’t been pushing AI risk as a strong campaign issue, he only acknowledged it modestly. If you think that AI risk could become a partisan battle, you might want to ask yourself why automation of labor—Yang’s loudest talking point—has NOT become subject to partisan division (even though some people disagree with it).
My (relatively weak and mostly intuitive) sense is that automation of labor and surrounding legislation has become a pretty polarized issue on which rational analysis has become quite difficult, so I don’t think this seems like a good counterexample.
By ‘polarized partisan issue’ do you merely mean that people have very different opinions and settle into different camps and make it hard for rational dialogue across the gap? That comes about naturally in the process of intellectual change, it has already happened with AI risk, and I’m not sure that a political push will worsen it (as the existing camps are not necessarily coequal with the political parties).
I was referring to the possibility that, for instance, Dems and the GOP take opposing party lines on the subject and fight over it. Which definitely isn’t happening.
Making AI Alignment into a highly polarized partisan issue would be an obvious one.
I don’t think that making alignment a partisan issue is a likely outcome. The president’s actions would be executive guidance for a few agencies. This sort of thing often reflects partisan ideology, but doesn’t cause it. And Yang hasn’t been pushing AI risk as a strong campaign issue, he only acknowledged it modestly. If you think that AI risk could become a partisan battle, you might want to ask yourself why automation of labor—Yang’s loudest talking point—has NOT become subject to partisan division (even though some people disagree with it).
My (relatively weak and mostly intuitive) sense is that automation of labor and surrounding legislation has become a pretty polarized issue on which rational analysis has become quite difficult, so I don’t think this seems like a good counterexample.
By ‘polarized partisan issue’ do you merely mean that people have very different opinions and settle into different camps and make it hard for rational dialogue across the gap? That comes about naturally in the process of intellectual change, it has already happened with AI risk, and I’m not sure that a political push will worsen it (as the existing camps are not necessarily coequal with the political parties).
I was referring to the possibility that, for instance, Dems and the GOP take opposing party lines on the subject and fight over it. Which definitely isn’t happening.
Right. Important to clarify that I’m more compelled by Yang’s open-mindedness & mood affiliation than the particular plan of calling a lot of partisan attention to AI.