Hm, if I felt timelines were that short I would probably feel like I knew which company/government was going to be responsible for actually building AGI (or at least narrow it to a few). The plan is to convince such orgs to ask me for advice, then have a team ready to research & give them the best possible advice, and hope that is good enough.
To convince them: I would be trying to leverage my power/influence to get to a position where leaders of the AGI-building organization would see me as someone to consult for help if they had a promising AGI-looking-thing and were trying to figure out how best to deploy it.
How?
if rich, donating lots of money to causes that such people care about and thus buying invitations to conferences and parties where they might hang out.
If otherwise influential, then use my influence to get their attention with similar results.
There might be other leveraged projects (like blogs, etc) that could generate lots of influence and admiration among the leaders of AGI-building orgs
Simultaneously, I would also be trying to join (or create, if necessary) some sort of think tank group comprising people who are the best for advice on short term AGI strategy. Again, power and money seem useful for putting together such a group—you should be able to recruit the best possible people with star power, and/or pay them well, to start thinking about such things full time. The hard part here is shaping the group in the right way, so that they are both smart and thoughtful about high stakes decisions, and their advice will be listened to and trusted by the AGI-building organization.
Assumptions / how does this strategy fail?
I cannot build the influence required:
I have to influence too many AGI builders (because I don’t know which one is most likely to succeed), so my influence is too diluted
They are not influenceable in this way
AGI builders don’t ask for the advice even if they want to:
maybe the project is too secret
advice can’t solve the problem:
maybe there is an internal deadline—things are moving too fast and they don’t have time to ask
maybe there are external deadlines, like competition between AGI builders, such that even if they get the advice they choose not to heed it
maybe the AGI building leadership doesn’t have sufficient control over the organization, so even if they get advice, their underlings fail to heed it
advice is too low quality
I wasn’t able to recruit the people for the think tank
Hm, if I felt timelines were that short I would probably feel like I knew which company/government was going to be responsible for actually building AGI (or at least narrow it to a few). The plan is to convince such orgs to ask me for advice, then have a team ready to research & give them the best possible advice, and hope that is good enough.
To convince them: I would be trying to leverage my power/influence to get to a position where leaders of the AGI-building organization would see me as someone to consult for help if they had a promising AGI-looking-thing and were trying to figure out how best to deploy it.
How?
if rich, donating lots of money to causes that such people care about and thus buying invitations to conferences and parties where they might hang out.
If otherwise influential, then use my influence to get their attention with similar results.
There might be other leveraged projects (like blogs, etc) that could generate lots of influence and admiration among the leaders of AGI-building orgs
Simultaneously, I would also be trying to join (or create, if necessary) some sort of think tank group comprising people who are the best for advice on short term AGI strategy. Again, power and money seem useful for putting together such a group—you should be able to recruit the best possible people with star power, and/or pay them well, to start thinking about such things full time. The hard part here is shaping the group in the right way, so that they are both smart and thoughtful about high stakes decisions, and their advice will be listened to and trusted by the AGI-building organization.
Assumptions / how does this strategy fail?
I cannot build the influence required:
I have to influence too many AGI builders (because I don’t know which one is most likely to succeed), so my influence is too diluted
They are not influenceable in this way
AGI builders don’t ask for the advice even if they want to:
maybe the project is too secret
advice can’t solve the problem:
maybe there is an internal deadline—things are moving too fast and they don’t have time to ask
maybe there are external deadlines, like competition between AGI builders, such that even if they get the advice they choose not to heed it
maybe the AGI building leadership doesn’t have sufficient control over the organization, so even if they get advice, their underlings fail to heed it
advice is too low quality
I wasn’t able to recruit the people for the think tank
They just didn’t come up with the answer