Just like environmentalists often block some of the most valuable work on fixing climate change (e.g. nuclear energy, geoengineering, land use reform)
Something else you may note here. The reason environmentalists are wrong is they focus on the local issue and ignore the larger picture.
Nuclear energy: they focus on the local risk of a meltdown or waste disposal, and ignore the carbon emitting power plants that must be there somewhere else for each nuclear plant they successfully block. Carbon emissions are global, even the worst nuclear disaster is local.
Geoengineering: they simply won’t engage on actually discussing the cost benefit ratios. Their reasoning shuts down or they argue “we can’t know the consequences” as an argument to do nothing. This ignores the bigger picture that temperatures are rising and will continue to rise in all scenarios.
Land use reform : they focus on the local habitat loss to convert a house to apartments, or an empty lot to apartments, and ignore that laws of conservation of number of humans. Each human who can’t live in the apartment will live somewhere, and probably at lower density with more total environmental damage.
Demanding AI Pauses: This locally stops model training, if approved, in the USA and EU. The places they can see if they bring out the signs in San Francisco. It means that top AI lab employees will be laid off, bringing any “secret sauce” with them to work for foreign labs who are not restricted. It also frees up wafer production for foreign labs to order compute on the same wafers. If Nvidia is blocked from manufacturing H100s, it frees up a share in the market for a foreign chip vendor.
It has minimal, possibly zero effect on the development of AGI if you think wafer production is the rate limiting factor.
AI Pause generally means a global, indefinite pause on frontier development. I’m not talking about a unilateral pause and I don’t think any country would consider that feasible.
That’s a reasonable position but if a global pause on nuclear weapons could not be agreed on what’s different about AI?
If AI works to even a fraction of its potential, it’s a more useful tool than a nuclear weapon, which is mostly an expensive threat you can’t actually use most of the time, right?
Why would a multilateral agreement on this ever happen?
Assuming you agree AI is more tempting than nukes, what would lead to an agreement being possible?
Something else you may note here. The reason environmentalists are wrong is they focus on the local issue and ignore the larger picture.
Nuclear energy: they focus on the local risk of a meltdown or waste disposal, and ignore the carbon emitting power plants that must be there somewhere else for each nuclear plant they successfully block. Carbon emissions are global, even the worst nuclear disaster is local.
Geoengineering: they simply won’t engage on actually discussing the cost benefit ratios. Their reasoning shuts down or they argue “we can’t know the consequences” as an argument to do nothing. This ignores the bigger picture that temperatures are rising and will continue to rise in all scenarios.
Land use reform : they focus on the local habitat loss to convert a house to apartments, or an empty lot to apartments, and ignore that laws of conservation of number of humans. Each human who can’t live in the apartment will live somewhere, and probably at lower density with more total environmental damage.
Demanding AI Pauses: This locally stops model training, if approved, in the USA and EU. The places they can see if they bring out the signs in San Francisco. It means that top AI lab employees will be laid off, bringing any “secret sauce” with them to work for foreign labs who are not restricted. It also frees up wafer production for foreign labs to order compute on the same wafers. If Nvidia is blocked from manufacturing H100s, it frees up a share in the market for a foreign chip vendor.
It has minimal, possibly zero effect on the development of AGI if you think wafer production is the rate limiting factor.
AI Pause generally means a global, indefinite pause on frontier development. I’m not talking about a unilateral pause and I don’t think any country would consider that feasible.
That’s a reasonable position but if a global pause on nuclear weapons could not be agreed on what’s different about AI?
If AI works to even a fraction of its potential, it’s a more useful tool than a nuclear weapon, which is mostly an expensive threat you can’t actually use most of the time, right?
Why would a multilateral agreement on this ever happen?
Assuming you agree AI is more tempting than nukes, what would lead to an agreement being possible?