Hillary, thank you for this and for the Leicht piece which I had not encountered before. It is sharp and I think largely correct, and it maps onto something I experience directly working in Nigeria.
The frame of national interest as the entry point for AI safety in non-Western contexts resonates strongly. In my ITU work and in conversations with Nigerian government officials, the language of existential risk lands poorly. It sounds abstract, Western, and frankly like someone else’s problem. But the language of economic sovereignty, of not wanting to be economically colonised a second time through AI-driven labour displacement and data extraction, that lands immediately. The fear is not superintelligence. The fear is that the value generated by Nigerian workers, Nigerian data, Nigerian creativity flows entirely to San Francisco while Nigeria gets the disruption without the upside. That is a tractable safety-relevant concern and it is deeply national.
Where I push back slightly on Leicht is the implicit suggestion that national interest and global catastrophic risk reduction are separable strategies to choose between. From where I sit they are not separable. Building domestic AI safety literacy in Nigeria is simultaneously a national interest play and a global safety play. A Nigerian policymaker who understands misuse risks, oversight failure, and value misalignment is better equipped to protect Nigerian citizens and also more likely to show up at ITU negotiations with something useful to contribute. The two things compound each other.
On your Canada question specifically: the most honest answer is that middle powers including Canada probably cannot stop the race. But they can determine whether the landing is controlled or catastrophic. That is not nothing. It is actually everything.
Thank you for this! I think the literacy angle is really powerful as it taps into knowledge-is-power through informing action without reducing its value to whether we can directly affect global power development.
Hillary, thank you for this and for the Leicht piece which I had not encountered before. It is sharp and I think largely correct, and it maps onto something I experience directly working in Nigeria.
The frame of national interest as the entry point for AI safety in non-Western contexts resonates strongly. In my ITU work and in conversations with Nigerian government officials, the language of existential risk lands poorly. It sounds abstract, Western, and frankly like someone else’s problem. But the language of economic sovereignty, of not wanting to be economically colonised a second time through AI-driven labour displacement and data extraction, that lands immediately. The fear is not superintelligence. The fear is that the value generated by Nigerian workers, Nigerian data, Nigerian creativity flows entirely to San Francisco while Nigeria gets the disruption without the upside. That is a tractable safety-relevant concern and it is deeply national.
Where I push back slightly on Leicht is the implicit suggestion that national interest and global catastrophic risk reduction are separable strategies to choose between. From where I sit they are not separable. Building domestic AI safety literacy in Nigeria is simultaneously a national interest play and a global safety play. A Nigerian policymaker who understands misuse risks, oversight failure, and value misalignment is better equipped to protect Nigerian citizens and also more likely to show up at ITU negotiations with something useful to contribute. The two things compound each other.
On your Canada question specifically: the most honest answer is that middle powers including Canada probably cannot stop the race. But they can determine whether the landing is controlled or catastrophic. That is not nothing. It is actually everything.
Thank you for this! I think the literacy angle is really powerful as it taps into knowledge-is-power through informing action without reducing its value to whether we can directly affect global power development.
I also realize my comment may be too tangential to your original post to really belong here—I’ve started a new post on the topic: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/oELJZFY9LBAkpCccw/is-safe-ai-development-intractable-for-middle-powers-the