{making humanity more safe VS shortening AGI timelines} is itself a false dichotomy or false spectrum.
Why? Because in some situations, shortening AGI timelines could make humanity more safe, such as by avoiding an overhang of over-abundant computing resources that AGI could abruptly take advantage of if it’s invented too far in the future (the “compute overhang” argument).
I think this also ignores the counterfactual world with less safety research, where the equivalent advances, which are funded because of commercial incentives, come from less generalizable safety research, and we end up with less well prosaically aligned but similarly capable systems. (And I haven’t really laid out this argument before, but I think it generalizes to the counterfactual world without OpenAI or even Deepmind being inspired by AI safety concerns.)
I think this also ignores the counterfactual world with less safety research, where the equivalent advances, which are funded because of commercial incentives, come from less generalizable safety research, and we end up with less well prosaically aligned but similarly capable systems. (And I haven’t really laid out this argument before, but I think it generalizes to the counterfactual world without OpenAI or even Deepmind being inspired by AI safety concerns.)