First, to your second point, I agree that they aren’t comparable, so I don’t want to respond to your discussion. I was not, in this specific post, arguing that anything about safety in the two domains is comparable. The claim, which you agree to in the final paragraph, is that there is an underlying fallacy which is present both places.
However, returning to your first tangential point, the claim that the acceleration versus deceleration debate is theoretical and academic seems hard to support. Domains where everyone is dedicated to minimizing regulation and going full speed ahead are vastly different than those where people agree that significant care is needed, and where there is significant regulation and public debate. You seem to explicitly admit exactly this when you say that nuclear power is very different than AI because of the “very high levels of anti-nuclear campaigning and risk aversion”—that is, public pressure against nuclear seemed to have stopped the metaphorical tide. So I’m confused about your beliefs here.
No worries, there was always a chance I was misinterpreting the claim in that section. Happy for us to skip that.
For my second section I was talking more about stasis in the more full sense ie a pause in innovation in certain areas. Some are asking for full stasis for a period of time in the name of safety, others for a slow-down. I agree that safe stasis is a fallacy for the reasons I outlined, and agree with most of your points—particularly everything being a risk-risk tradeoff. I’m not entirely sold on the plausability of slowdowns or pauses from a logistical deployment perspective, which is where I think I got bogged down in the reeds in my response there.
First, to your second point, I agree that they aren’t comparable, so I don’t want to respond to your discussion. I was not, in this specific post, arguing that anything about safety in the two domains is comparable. The claim, which you agree to in the final paragraph, is that there is an underlying fallacy which is present both places.
However, returning to your first tangential point, the claim that the acceleration versus deceleration debate is theoretical and academic seems hard to support. Domains where everyone is dedicated to minimizing regulation and going full speed ahead are vastly different than those where people agree that significant care is needed, and where there is significant regulation and public debate. You seem to explicitly admit exactly this when you say that nuclear power is very different than AI because of the “very high levels of anti-nuclear campaigning and risk aversion”—that is, public pressure against nuclear seemed to have stopped the metaphorical tide. So I’m confused about your beliefs here.
No worries, there was always a chance I was misinterpreting the claim in that section. Happy for us to skip that.
For my second section I was talking more about stasis in the more full sense ie a pause in innovation in certain areas. Some are asking for full stasis for a period of time in the name of safety, others for a slow-down. I agree that safe stasis is a fallacy for the reasons I outlined, and agree with most of your points—particularly everything being a risk-risk tradeoff. I’m not entirely sold on the plausability of slowdowns or pauses from a logistical deployment perspective, which is where I think I got bogged down in the reeds in my response there.