UI and complementary technologies: I’m sort of confused about your claim about comparative advantage. Are you saying that there aren’t people in this community whose comparative advantage might be designing UI? That would seem surprising.
More broadly, though:
I’m not sure how much “we can just outsource this” really cuts against the core of our argument (how to get something done is a question of tactics, and it could still be a strategic priority even if we just wanted to spend a lot of money on it)
I guess I feel, though, that you’re saying this won’t be a big bottleneck
I think that that may be true if you’re considering automated alignment research in particular. But I’m not on board with that being the clear priority here
Which applications to focus on: I agree that epistemic tools and coordination-enabling tools will eventually have markets and so will get built at some point absent intervention. But this doesn’t feel like a very strong argument—the whole point is that we may care about accelerating applications even if it’s not by a long period. And I don’t think that these will obviously be among the most profitable applications people could make (especially if you can start specializing to the most high-leverage epistemic and coordination tools).
Also, we could make a similar argument that “automated safety” research won’t get dropped, since it’s so obviously in the interests of whoever’s winning the race.