Great post. Listing concrete examples of orphaned policies makes it much easier for folks to evaluate how much of a priority drafting orphaned policies should be.
That said, my belief is that actually it’s not just fine for the AI governance community to propose far more policies than policies actually drafted, but this is exactly the way that it should be.
Generally, when you have a pipeline, you want filtering to occur at each stage. I have a strong intuition that the impact of policies is quite heavy-tailed, particularly because some policies that initially seem promising might actually turn out to be net-negative, impractical or hard to have any confidence in.
Here’s my hot-takes (disclaimer: by hot-takes, I really do mean hot-takes and I’m not a policy professional!)
• Windfalls clause: robustly good, but not on the critical path • Antitrust waiver: seems robustly good • Visa reform: hard to determine the sign of due to espionage concerns • Insurance requirements: hard to determine the sign of due to moral hazard • Public grant funding: quite hard to make sure this goes to anything useful, that said, UK AISI is distributing grants and I’m quite optimistic about their judgement • Global crisis hotline: seems robustly good • Compute monitoring: seems robustly good • LAW Boycott: hard to determine sign due to unstable equilibrium • Industry standards: I’m a lot more pessimistic about this than most folks. Very easy for this to create a false sense of security. Unfortunately, at the end of the day, if a company doesn’t care, they don’t care • Structured access to research: I suspect that the companies will either give it voluntarily or it’ll not be worth the political capital to try to mandate
So 3⁄11 seem robustly good, with another robustly good but not on the critical path.
Question: Are there any organisations focused on taking general policy proposals and developing them into specific proposals for legislation? I could see value in having an organising specialising in this stage if the majority of governance organisations are just throwing rather general proposals over the wall and hoping someone else will fill in the details.
I’m not aware of any such organizations! This is an example of one of the ‘holes’ that I’m trying to highlight in our ecosystem.
We have so many people proposing and discussing general ideas, but there’s no process in place to rigorously compare those ideas to each other, choose a few of those ideas to move forward, write up legislation for the ideas that are selected, and advertise that legislation to policymakers.
I don’t object to the community proposing 5-10x more ideas than it formally writes up as policies; as you say, some filtering is appropriate. I do object to the community spending 5-10x more time proposing ideas than it spends on drafting them. The reason why it makes sense to have lots of ideas is that proposing an idea is (or should be) quick and easy compared to the hard work of drafting it into an actual policy document. If we spend 70% of our resources on general academic discussion of ideas without anyone ever making a deliberate effort to select and promote one or two of those ideas for legislative advocacy, then something’s gone badly wrong.
Great post. Listing concrete examples of orphaned policies makes it much easier for folks to evaluate how much of a priority drafting orphaned policies should be.
That said, my belief is that actually it’s not just fine for the AI governance community to propose far more policies than policies actually drafted, but this is exactly the way that it should be.
Generally, when you have a pipeline, you want filtering to occur at each stage. I have a strong intuition that the impact of policies is quite heavy-tailed, particularly because some policies that initially seem promising might actually turn out to be net-negative, impractical or hard to have any confidence in.
Here’s my hot-takes (disclaimer: by hot-takes, I really do mean hot-takes and I’m not a policy professional!)
• Windfalls clause: robustly good, but not on the critical path
• Antitrust waiver: seems robustly good
• Visa reform: hard to determine the sign of due to espionage concerns
• Insurance requirements: hard to determine the sign of due to moral hazard
• Public grant funding: quite hard to make sure this goes to anything useful, that said, UK AISI is distributing grants and I’m quite optimistic about their judgement
• Global crisis hotline: seems robustly good
• Compute monitoring: seems robustly good
• LAW Boycott: hard to determine sign due to unstable equilibrium
• Industry standards: I’m a lot more pessimistic about this than most folks. Very easy for this to create a false sense of security. Unfortunately, at the end of the day, if a company doesn’t care, they don’t care
• Structured access to research: I suspect that the companies will either give it voluntarily or it’ll not be worth the political capital to try to mandate
So 3⁄11 seem robustly good, with another robustly good but not on the critical path.
Question: Are there any organisations focused on taking general policy proposals and developing them into specific proposals for legislation? I could see value in having an organising specialising in this stage if the majority of governance organisations are just throwing rather general proposals over the wall and hoping someone else will fill in the details.
I’m not aware of any such organizations! This is an example of one of the ‘holes’ that I’m trying to highlight in our ecosystem.
We have so many people proposing and discussing general ideas, but there’s no process in place to rigorously compare those ideas to each other, choose a few of those ideas to move forward, write up legislation for the ideas that are selected, and advertise that legislation to policymakers.
I don’t object to the community proposing 5-10x more ideas than it formally writes up as policies; as you say, some filtering is appropriate. I do object to the community spending 5-10x more time proposing ideas than it spends on drafting them. The reason why it makes sense to have lots of ideas is that proposing an idea is (or should be) quick and easy compared to the hard work of drafting it into an actual policy document. If we spend 70% of our resources on general academic discussion of ideas without anyone ever making a deliberate effort to select and promote one or two of those ideas for legislative advocacy, then something’s gone badly wrong.