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Notes -
In AI safely news, the "big, beautiful bill" Republicans are pushing through includes 10 year ban on states regulating AI. Seems pretty reckless, who could even imagine what AI could do in 10 years.
I'd much rather see different states experiment with different forms of regulation, but it's good news for regulatory clarity and therefore the standing of the US in this domain.
At least China won't automatically win the race from the West kneecapping itself.
AI has a lesser problem of enabling dictatorship and a greater problem of rogue AI. In foot-race terms, the lesser problem is that there are other competitors, and the greater problem is that the finish line has landmines under it strong enough to blow up the whole track. As such, until and unless the mines are removed, "sprint harder" is not a solution; if the landmines are set off, you're still dead regardless of who did it.
What if you believe that when you reach the finish line, there's a 5% chance that the track will blow up, but if the other guys reach the finish line first, there's a 10% chance the track will blow up. Also you believe the other guys don't take the risks seriously so they won't stop running. Is "sprint harder" a valid option?
I mean, the preferred solution to "the other guys don't take the risks seriously so they won't stop running" is generally "whip out a pistol and shoot them", although the numbers you've given are on the edges of that solution's range of optimality.
I will note that in reality, the CPC appears fairly cognisant of the risks, probably would enforce stricter controls than "Openly Evil AI" and "lol we're Meta" (Google and Anthropic are less clear), and might be amenable to an agreed slowdown (there are other nations that won't be and will need to be knocked over, but it's much easier to invade a UAE or a Cayman Islands than it is the PRC).
Also, my P(Doom|no slowdown) is like 0.95-0.97, although there will likely be a fair number of warning shots first (i.e. the "no slowdown" condition implies ignoring those warning shots); to align a neural net you need to be able to solve "what does this code do when run" (because you're checking whether a neural net has properties you want in order to procedurally mess with it, rather than explicitly writing it, and hence to train "doesn't kill me when run" you need to be able to identify "kills me when run" in a way other than "run it and see whether it kills me"), and that's the halting problem (proven unsolvable in the general case, and neural nets don't look to me like enough of a special case).
I think the main point of contention is this. As evidenced by discussions up and down this thread, for most people, the number is closer to 0.05 than 0.95, so there's no political will to do the other things you suggest. A real-world example: Anthropic. When the OpenAI engineers quit the company because it wouldn't slow down for safety, they didn't shoot the remaining employees, instead they created a competitor to sprint faster with the belief that if they reach AGI first, it'll be better aligned for humanity.
To be clear, I'm in favour of co-ordinated meanness on this one - government action. I've exhaustively considered the possibilities of terrorism and with the exception of a certain harebrained scheme which requires nuclear weapons (and good luck getting those as a terrorist), the maths doesn't work out. No single point of failure, awareness raising of the mere idea is unnecessary*, and that leaves you with "terrorism only makes sense if it can be sustained over a period of time" which the Rats can't (and especially can't on a global scale).
I was initially using the metaphor of the USA in a race with other countries; by "shoot them" I meant war. Nuclear war if necessary, but as noted I'm optimistic about the possibility of getting the nuclear powers on board.
Anthropic's actions I model as a combination of lower P(Doom), self-overestimation, greater tolerance for Doom (Silicon Valley tends to attract risk-tolerant types), and most importantly "it's really important to be careful what you get good at".
*Take the climate soup-throwers as an example. They'd be of use if nobody'd heard of global warming. But people have heard of global warming, they (including me) just disagree with the soup-throwers' opinion that it's an X-risk requiring major action RTFN, and throwing soup is not going to convince people of that. Likewise, there have been enough "AI rebellion" films that that kind of terrorism is not really useful (and TBH public opinion is already pretty strongly against AI).
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