Richard, I hope you turn out to be correct that public support for AI governance ideas will become less of a bottleneck as more powerful AI systems are released!
But I think it is plausible that we should not leave this to chance. Several of the governance ideas you have listed as promising (e.g., global GPU tracking, data center monitoring) are probably infeasible at the moment, to say the least. It is plausible that these ideas will only become globally implementable once a critical mass of people around the world become highly aware of and concerned about AGI dangers.
This means that timing may be an issue. Will the most detrimental of the AGI dangers manifest before meaningful preventative measures are implemented globally? It is plausible that before the necessary critical mass of public support builds up, a catastrophic or even existential outcome may already have occurred. It would then be too late.
The plausibility of this scenario is why I agree with Akash that identifying and raising public awareness of AGI’s dangers is an underrated approach.
Richard, I hope you turn out to be correct that public support for AI governance ideas will become less of a bottleneck as more powerful AI systems are released!
But I think it is plausible that we should not leave this to chance. Several of the governance ideas you have listed as promising (e.g., global GPU tracking, data center monitoring) are probably infeasible at the moment, to say the least. It is plausible that these ideas will only become globally implementable once a critical mass of people around the world become highly aware of and concerned about AGI dangers.
This means that timing may be an issue. Will the most detrimental of the AGI dangers manifest before meaningful preventative measures are implemented globally? It is plausible that before the necessary critical mass of public support builds up, a catastrophic or even existential outcome may already have occurred. It would then be too late.
The plausibility of this scenario is why I agree with Akash that identifying and raising public awareness of AGI’s dangers is an underrated approach.