Thanks for surfacing this—in the AI safety courses & organization researching I’ve been exploring, the ominous absence in agenda-setting of the vast majority of the world both by geographic and population scale is really frightening. So this is me giving an ineffectual +1, I have no solutions.
There’s a somewhat along-side this question I’ve been hovering around. I’m in Canada, and from my perspective while the frontier development US-China poles make the current intent focus on the US make sense, at the same time I’m increasingly confused why the potential for middle power impact seems limited to our failed leverage to shape (ie stop) the frantic American development speed. Surely in concert we can do more than helplessly hang on and hope to benefit more than we’re screwed?
I finally found a perspective on this worded way better than I could hope to put it, here: https://substack.com/home/post/p-185388441 (How AI Safety Is Getting Middle Powers Wrong—The case for pivoting from global governance to national interests, Anton Leicht).
Interesting to me is the case for these countries to actually act explicitly in national self-interest with AI safety integrated as national security to better gain salience and strategic action. I could see this picking up traction in even non-democratic contexts.
I’m curious about your thoughts on how this might resonate in Nigeria, SA, etc?
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 this is a genuinely interesting tension and the Leicht piece sharpens it well. But I want to offer a perspective that I think is missing from both his framing and from the Canadian middle power conversation.
Leicht is essentially writing about Canada, the EU, the UK. Countries with functioning institutions, real technical capacity, and enough economic weight that their national interest is at least legible to the people making frontier AI decisions. When he says pivot to national interest, he means countries that have a national interest coherent enough to pivot to.
Now apply that frame to Nigeria. We are the largest economy in Africa, 220 million people, a tech ecosystem that is genuinely world class in fintech and mobile. And we have almost zero representation in any of the rooms where AI governance decisions are being made. Not because we lack smart people. Because the entire infrastructure of the conversation, the fellowships, the think tanks, the policy networks, the funding, was built without us and has not reconfigured to include us.
So here is what I think the Leicht piece misses. For countries like Nigeria the question is not how do we pivot from global governance to national interest. The question is how do we get into the game at all before the rules are set without us. That is a prior problem. And it is the problem I am actually working on.
The honest answer to your Canada question is this. Middle powers with existing institutional capacity should absolutely do what Leicht says. But they should also be asking which countries are not even at the table yet and what it would take to get them there. Because a stable AI transition requires more than Canada and the EU figuring out their national strategies. It requires the Global South having enough capacity to participate in the conversation as something other than passive recipients of whatever gets decided elsewhere.
That is not an ineffectual plus one. That is actually the work.
Thanks for surfacing this—in the AI safety courses & organization researching I’ve been exploring, the ominous absence in agenda-setting of the vast majority of the world both by geographic and population scale is really frightening. So this is me giving an ineffectual +1, I have no solutions.
There’s a somewhat along-side this question I’ve been hovering around. I’m in Canada, and from my perspective while the frontier development US-China poles make the current intent focus on the US make sense, at the same time I’m increasingly confused why the potential for middle power impact seems limited to our failed leverage to shape (ie stop) the frantic American development speed. Surely in concert we can do more than helplessly hang on and hope to benefit more than we’re screwed?
I finally found a perspective on this worded way better than I could hope to put it, here: https://substack.com/home/post/p-185388441 (How AI Safety Is Getting Middle Powers Wrong—The case for pivoting from global governance to national interests, Anton Leicht).
Interesting to me is the case for these countries to actually act explicitly in national self-interest with AI safety integrated as national security to better gain salience and strategic action. I could see this picking up traction in even non-democratic contexts.
I’m curious about your thoughts on how this might resonate in Nigeria, SA, etc?
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
Hillary this is a genuinely interesting tension and the Leicht piece sharpens it well. But I want to offer a perspective that I think is missing from both his framing and from the Canadian middle power conversation.
Leicht is essentially writing about Canada, the EU, the UK. Countries with functioning institutions, real technical capacity, and enough economic weight that their national interest is at least legible to the people making frontier AI decisions. When he says pivot to national interest, he means countries that have a national interest coherent enough to pivot to.
Now apply that frame to Nigeria. We are the largest economy in Africa, 220 million people, a tech ecosystem that is genuinely world class in fintech and mobile. And we have almost zero representation in any of the rooms where AI governance decisions are being made. Not because we lack smart people. Because the entire infrastructure of the conversation, the fellowships, the think tanks, the policy networks, the funding, was built without us and has not reconfigured to include us.
So here is what I think the Leicht piece misses. For countries like Nigeria the question is not how do we pivot from global governance to national interest. The question is how do we get into the game at all before the rules are set without us. That is a prior problem. And it is the problem I am actually working on.
The honest answer to your Canada question is this. Middle powers with existing institutional capacity should absolutely do what Leicht says. But they should also be asking which countries are not even at the table yet and what it would take to get them there. Because a stable AI transition requires more than Canada and the EU figuring out their national strategies. It requires the Global South having enough capacity to participate in the conversation as something other than passive recipients of whatever gets decided elsewhere.
That is not an ineffectual plus one. That is actually the work.