Basically +1 here. I guess some relevant considerations are the extent to which a tool can act as antidote to its own (or related) misuse—and under what conditions of effort, attention, compute, etc. If that can be arranged, then ‘simply’ making sure that access is somewhat distributed is a help. On the other hand, it’s conceivable that compute advantages or structural advantages could make misuse of a given tech harder to block, in which case we’d want to know that (without, perhaps, broadcasting it indiscriminately) and develop responses. Plausibly those dynamics might change nonlinearly with the introduction of epistemic/coordination tech of other kinds at different times.
In theory, it’s often cheaper and easier to verify the properties of a proposal (‘does it concentrate power?’) than to generate one satisfying given properties, which gives an advantage to a defender if proposals and activity are mostly visible. But subtlety and obfuscation and misdirection can mean that knowing what properties to check for is itself a difficult task, tilting the other way.
Likewise, narrowly facilitating coordination might produce novel collusion with substantial negative externalities on outsiders. But then ex hypothesi those outsiders have an outsized incentive to block that collusion, if only they can foresee it and coordinate in turn.
Basically +1 here. I guess some relevant considerations are the extent to which a tool can act as antidote to its own (or related) misuse—and under what conditions of effort, attention, compute, etc. If that can be arranged, then ‘simply’ making sure that access is somewhat distributed is a help. On the other hand, it’s conceivable that compute advantages or structural advantages could make misuse of a given tech harder to block, in which case we’d want to know that (without, perhaps, broadcasting it indiscriminately) and develop responses. Plausibly those dynamics might change nonlinearly with the introduction of epistemic/coordination tech of other kinds at different times.
In theory, it’s often cheaper and easier to verify the properties of a proposal (‘does it concentrate power?’) than to generate one satisfying given properties, which gives an advantage to a defender if proposals and activity are mostly visible. But subtlety and obfuscation and misdirection can mean that knowing what properties to check for is itself a difficult task, tilting the other way.
Likewise, narrowly facilitating coordination might produce novel collusion with substantial negative externalities on outsiders. But then ex hypothesi those outsiders have an outsized incentive to block that collusion, if only they can foresee it and coordinate in turn.
It’s confusing.