If you’re super focused on that issue, then it will definitely be better to spend your money on actual AI research, or on some kind of direct effort to push the government to consider the issue (if such an effort exists).
I am, and that’s what I’m wondering. The “definitely” isn’t so obvious to me. Another $20 million to MIRI vs. an increase in the probability of Yang’s presidency by, let’s say, 5%--I don’t think it’s clear cut. (And I think MIRI is the best place to fund research).
Is your claim that AI policy is currently talent-constrained, and having Yang as president would lead to more people working on it, thereby making it money-constrained?
No—just that there’s perhaps a unique opportunity for cash to make a difference. Otherwise, it seems like orgs are struggling to spend money to make progress in AI policy. But that’s just what I hear.
Can you elaborate on this?
First pass: power is good. Second pass: get practice doing things like autonomous weapons bans, build a consensus around getting countries to agree to international monitoring of software, get practice doing that monitoring, negotiate minimally invasive ways of doing this that protect intellectual property, devote resources to AI safety research (and normalize the field), and ten more things I haven’t thought of.
Additionally, Morning Consult shows higher support than all other pollsters. The average for Steyer in early states is considerably less favorable.
Good to know.
Steyer is running ads with little competition
Really?
I am in general more trusting, so I appreciate this perspective. I know he’s a huge fan of Sam Harris and has historically listened to his podcast, so I imagine he’s head Sam’s thoughts (and maybe Stuart Russell’s thoughts) on AGI.
The stake of the public good in any given election is much larger than the stake of any given entity, so the correct amount for altruists to invest in an election should be much larger than for a self-interested corporation or person.
not that he single-handedly caused Trump’s victory.
Didn’t claim this.
This is naive.
Not sure what this adds.
MIRI’s current size seems to me to be approximately right for this purpose, and as far as I know MIRI staff don’t think MIRI is too small to continue making steady progress.
My guess is that this intuition is relatively inelastic to MIRI’s size. It might be worth trying to generate the counterfactual intuition here if MIRI were half its size or double its size. If that process outputs a similar intuition, it might be worth attempting to forget how many people MIRI employs in this area, and ask how many people should be working on a topic that by your estimation has a 10% chance of being instrumental to an existential win. Though my number is higher than 10%, I think even if I had that estimate, my answer to the number of people that should be working on that topic would be “as many as are available.”
The other thing is that in 20 years, we might want the president on the phone with very specific proposals. What are the odds they’ll spend a weekend discussing AGI with Andrew Yang if Yang used to be president vs. if he didn’t?
But as for what a president could actually do: create a treaty for countries to sign that ban research into AGI. Very few researchers are aiming for AGI anyway. Probably the best starting point would be to get the AI community on board with such a thing. It seems impossible today that consensus could be built about such a thing, but the presidency is a large pulpit. I’m not talking about making public speeches on topic; I mean inviting the most important AI researchers to the White House to chat with Stuart Russell and some other folks. There are so many details to work out that we could go back and forth on, but that’s one possibility for something that would be a big deal if it could be made to work.