Thanks so much, Michael, for your detailed and honest feedback! I really appreciate your time.
I agree that both threat models are real. AI safety research can lose its value when not kept secret, and humanity’s catastrophic and extinction risk increases if AI capabilities advances faster than valuable AI safety research.
Regarding your point that the Internet has significantly helped accelerate AI safety research, I would say two things. First, what matters is the Internet’s effect on valuable AI safety research. If much of the value in AI safety plans requires them being kept secret from the Internet (e.g., one’s plan in a rock-paper-scissors-type interaction), then the current Internet-forum-based research norms may not be increasing the rate of value generation by that much. In fact, it may plausibly be decreasing the rate of value generation, in light of the discussion in my post. So, we should vigorously investigate how much of the value in AI safety plans in fact requires secrecy.
Second, the fact that AI safety researchers (or more generally, people in the economy) are extensively using the Internet does not falsify the claim that the Internet may be close to net-zero or net-negative for community innovation. In this claim, the Internet is great at enticing people to use it and spend money on it, but it is not great at improving real innovation as measured by productivity gains. So, it has a redistributive rather than productive effect on how people spend their time and money. So, we should expect to see people (e.g., AI safety researchers) extensively use the Internet even if the Internet has not increased the innovation rate of real productivity gains.
What matters is the comparison with the counterfactual: if there were an extensive, possibly expensive, and Manhattan-Project-esque change in research norms for the whole community, could ease-of-research be largely kept the same even with secrecy gains? I think the answer may be plausibly “yes.”
How do we estimate the real effect of the Internet on the generation of valuable AI safety research? First, we would need to predict the value of AI safety research, particularly how its value is affected by its secrecy. This effort would be aided by game theory, past empirical evidence of real-world adversarial interactions, and the resolution of scientific debates about what AGI training would look like in the future.
Second, we would need to estimate how much the Internet affects the generation of this value. This effort would be aided by progress studies and other relevant fields of economics and history.
Edit: Writing to add a link for the case of why the Internet may be overrated for the purposes of real community innovation: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-06-20/what-the-web-didnt-deliver-high-economic-growth
This would definitely be a useful tag for a hostile AI.
Moreover, the fact that everyone can access tagged posts right now means that there are many ways by which tagged content may still be made accessible by the AGI, even in the event that the AGI corporation cooperates with us.
Secrecy is only likely to be kept if the information is known by a small set of people. (e.g., Conjecture’s infohazard document discusses this quite well)