My view: This is largely noise at best in the long-term, and extremely negative short term (but this could flip sign., and therefore bad for both the short and long-term future, and here’s why.
In the short-term, the key area isn’t “which values?” but more like “can we avoid misalignment towards a human?” And thus values of the US vs China matter less than alignment at all, and thus this isn’t important.
More generally, contra some EA folks, I think value lock-in isn’t as likely people think.
Long-term, their value differences don’t matter because of the fact that they probably won’t exist for a super long time.
Surely reducing the number of players, making it more likely that US entities develop AGI (who might be more or less careful, more or less competent, etc. than Chinese entities), and (perhaps) increasing conflict all matter for alignment? There are several factors here that push in opposite directions, and this comment is not an argument for why the sum is zero to negative.
I should actually change my comment to say that this would be extremely negative, as the US government seems to believe in TAI (in the Holden Karnofsky sense) and also want it to happen, which at the current state of alignment would be extremely negative news for humanity’s future, though this could flip sign to the positive end.
My view: This is largely noise at best in the long-term, and extremely negative short term (but this could flip sign., and therefore bad for both the short and long-term future, and here’s why.
In the short-term, the key area isn’t “which values?” but more like “can we avoid misalignment towards a human?” And thus values of the US vs China matter less than alignment at all, and thus this isn’t important.
More generally, contra some EA folks, I think value lock-in isn’t as likely people think.
Long-term, their value differences don’t matter because of the fact that they probably won’t exist for a super long time.
Surely reducing the number of players, making it more likely that US entities develop AGI (who might be more or less careful, more or less competent, etc. than Chinese entities), and (perhaps) increasing conflict all matter for alignment? There are several factors here that push in opposite directions, and this comment is not an argument for why the sum is zero to negative.
I should actually change my comment to say that this would be extremely negative, as the US government seems to believe in TAI (in the Holden Karnofsky sense) and also want it to happen, which at the current state of alignment would be extremely negative news for humanity’s future, though this could flip sign to the positive end.