Yep, my impression is that this is an opinion that people mostly adopted after spending a bunch of time in DC and engaging with governance stuff, and so is not something represented in the broader EA population.
My best explanation is that when working in governance, being pro-China is just very costly, and especially combining the belief that AI will be very powerful, and there is no urgency to beat China to it, seems very anti-memetic in DC, and so people working in the space started adopting those stances.
But I am not sure. There are also non-terrible arguments for beating China being really important (though they are mostly premised on alignment being relatively easy, which seems very wrong to me).
(though they are mostly premised on alignment being relatively easy, which seems very wrong to me)
Not just alignment being easy, but alignment being easy with overwhelmingly high probability. It seems to me that pushing for an arms race is bad even if there’s only a 5% chance that alignment is hard.
I think most of those people believe that “having an AI aligned to ‘China’s values’” would be comparably bad to a catastrophic misalignment failure, and if you believe that, 5% is not sufficient, if you think there is a greater than 5% of China ending up with “aligned AI” instead.
I think that’s not a reasonable position to hold but I don’t know how to constructively argue against it in a short comment so I’ll just register my disagreement.
Like, presumably China’s values include humans existing and having mostly good experiences.
Yep, my impression is that this is an opinion that people mostly adopted after spending a bunch of time in DC and engaging with governance stuff, and so is not something represented in the broader EA population.
My best explanation is that when working in governance, being pro-China is just very costly, and especially combining the belief that AI will be very powerful, and there is no urgency to beat China to it, seems very anti-memetic in DC, and so people working in the space started adopting those stances.
But I am not sure. There are also non-terrible arguments for beating China being really important (though they are mostly premised on alignment being relatively easy, which seems very wrong to me).
Not just alignment being easy, but alignment being easy with overwhelmingly high probability. It seems to me that pushing for an arms race is bad even if there’s only a 5% chance that alignment is hard.
I think most of those people believe that “having an AI aligned to ‘China’s values’” would be comparably bad to a catastrophic misalignment failure, and if you believe that, 5% is not sufficient, if you think there is a greater than 5% of China ending up with “aligned AI” instead.
I think that’s not a reasonable position to hold but I don’t know how to constructively argue against it in a short comment so I’ll just register my disagreement.
Like, presumably China’s values include humans existing and having mostly good experiences.
Yep, I agree with this, but it appears nevertheless a relatively prevalent opinion among many EAs working in AI policy.