It turned out to be a very easily solvable problem (heavily concentrated industry, very few production plants, technological substitution being very easy).
I think the Montreal Protocol is often misunderstood to be a great success story / positively indicative reference class for much harder problems like climate, AI, etc., biosecurity, when it really is an example of an exceptionally easy problem to solve.
Sure, but it still required a joint decision and international cooperation.
AI is also a heavily concentrated industry with only has a handful of labs with frontier models all in the same country. You could fairly easily largely pause them for a little while at least if you wanted to. I’m not saying this is a good idea or that itwould solve alignment, but it wouldn’t actually be that hard.
I think it’s helpful to look at successes even if there’s aren’t so many parallels with current big problems. We can underrate how doable big problems are if the political will is there.
It turned out to be a very easily solvable problem (heavily concentrated industry, very few production plants, technological substitution being very easy).
I think the Montreal Protocol is often misunderstood to be a great success story / positively indicative reference class for much harder problems like climate, AI, etc., biosecurity, when it really is an example of an exceptionally easy problem to solve.
Sure, but it still required a joint decision and international cooperation.
AI is also a heavily concentrated industry with only has a handful of labs with frontier models all in the same country. You could fairly easily largely pause them for a little while at least if you wanted to. I’m not saying this is a good idea or that itwould solve alignment, but it wouldn’t actually be that hard.
I think it’s helpful to look at successes even if there’s aren’t so many parallels with current big problems. We can underrate how doable big problems are if the political will is there.