To be fair, I know a few of the authors of the scenario tangentially, and one of them more closely. Easy to engage in good faith when I feel confident that the authors actually do care about the topic, are not bought by Silicon Valley, and are not in any way as reckless as “the likes of Marc Andreessen”. While I agree much more with your takes and policy position than their’s, I do want to emphasise that I think they very much deserve engagement in good faith, and with an eye to exploring strategies in an uncertain world constructively rather than dogmatically.
I haven’t looked in any detail at the modelling they did, so can’t comment on your skepticism with regards to that. On the two more substantive points, there’s not much need for me to comment, because I largely agree that the arguments the authors on these two fronts make are dubious (/underdeveloped). I would be curious to hear how proponents of massive data centre build-outs in Europe (or other “democratic middle powers”) would respond? Can we get to the crux of what divides serious analysts on this topic, and is there any way to make progress on resolving that crux (or, at least, understanding which irresolvable value differences sit at the core of it)?
I appreciate the bullet points at the end that raise the political angle intertwined with the discussions I’m calling for. I didn’t emphasise that angle a lot in my original post, because I hadn’t thought about it a lot; reading your quick notes, I think it does merit thinking about, so that’d be worth adding to my list of “questions I’d love to see contested and discussed”. Are you okay for me to take your notes as input to make an addition in the original post (would add a footnote linking to your comment as a source)?
Thanks for the recommended readings! I gave them a quick skim for now, and have added them to my own reading list as well as the still-very-incomplete-and-provisional living resource repository mentioned in the post: EU_AI_geopolitics_resources.
Good to hear from your perspective, I admit that my views are shaped by my specific academic direction as well.
Feel free to use anything you deem useful!
Some further thinking on the crux of it all: what irks me is that I can concede the general EA case for AI safety (there is a non-zero chance of highly dangerous superintelligence, and this justifies investments in moonshot AI safety ideas), but that the mindset of Europe 2031 hinges on a narrower case, where: a) AI becomes so advanced that it would devastate economies that don’t have access to the most advanced model (compare with manageable current-day inequalities, e.g. the West having exclusive access to advanced lithography, Denmark having the exclusive right to produce Ozempic) b) a competing company / country’s AI is not sufficiently close in capabilities to mitigate that devastation c) the AI does not become Bostrom-style superintelligent (that would introduce a level of abundance that makes this competition model irrelevant), and d) the probability of all this happening is high enough that it requires drastically reshaping the priorities of Europe’s legislation and economy
Hi pmanen,
To be fair, I know a few of the authors of the scenario tangentially, and one of them more closely. Easy to engage in good faith when I feel confident that the authors actually do care about the topic, are not bought by Silicon Valley, and are not in any way as reckless as “the likes of Marc Andreessen”. While I agree much more with your takes and policy position than their’s, I do want to emphasise that I think they very much deserve engagement in good faith, and with an eye to exploring strategies in an uncertain world constructively rather than dogmatically.
I haven’t looked in any detail at the modelling they did, so can’t comment on your skepticism with regards to that. On the two more substantive points, there’s not much need for me to comment, because I largely agree that the arguments the authors on these two fronts make are dubious (/underdeveloped). I would be curious to hear how proponents of massive data centre build-outs in Europe (or other “democratic middle powers”) would respond? Can we get to the crux of what divides serious analysts on this topic, and is there any way to make progress on resolving that crux (or, at least, understanding which irresolvable value differences sit at the core of it)?
I appreciate the bullet points at the end that raise the political angle intertwined with the discussions I’m calling for. I didn’t emphasise that angle a lot in my original post, because I hadn’t thought about it a lot; reading your quick notes, I think it does merit thinking about, so that’d be worth adding to my list of “questions I’d love to see contested and discussed”. Are you okay for me to take your notes as input to make an addition in the original post (would add a footnote linking to your comment as a source)?
Thanks for the recommended readings! I gave them a quick skim for now, and have added them to my own reading list as well as the still-very-incomplete-and-provisional living resource repository mentioned in the post: EU_AI_geopolitics_resources.
Good to hear from your perspective, I admit that my views are shaped by my specific academic direction as well.
Feel free to use anything you deem useful!
Some further thinking on the crux of it all: what irks me is that I can concede the general EA case for AI safety (there is a non-zero chance of highly dangerous superintelligence, and this justifies investments in moonshot AI safety ideas), but that the mindset of Europe 2031 hinges on a narrower case, where:
a) AI becomes so advanced that it would devastate economies that don’t have access to the most advanced model (compare with manageable current-day inequalities, e.g. the West having exclusive access to advanced lithography, Denmark having the exclusive right to produce Ozempic)
b) a competing company / country’s AI is not sufficiently close in capabilities to mitigate that devastation
c) the AI does not become Bostrom-style superintelligent (that would introduce a level of abundance that makes this competition model irrelevant), and
d) the probability of all this happening is high enough that it requires drastically reshaping the priorities of Europe’s legislation and economy