Daniel Kokotajlo

One of the questions I was planning on asking you is, look, during – one of my friends made this interesting point that during COVID, our community, less wrong whatever, were the first people on Mars to be saying this is a big deal, this is coming.

But there were also the people who are saying we've got to do the lockdowns now, they've got to be stringent and so forth.

At least some of them were.

And in retrospect, I think according to even their own views about what should have happened, they would say, actually, we were right about COVID, but we were wrong about lockdowns.

In fact, we should, lockdowns were on net negative or something.

I wonder what the equivalent for the AI safety community will be with respect to they saw AI coming, AGI coming sooner, they saw ASI coming.

What will they, in retrospect, regret?

My answer, just based on this initial discussion, seems to be nationalization.

Not only because it puts in...

it sort of deprioritizes the people who want to think about safety and more maybe prioritizes the national security state probably cares more about winning against China than making sure the chain of thought is interpretable.

And so you're just reducing the leverage of the people who care more about safety.

But also you're increasing the risk of the arms race in the first place.

Like China is more likely to do an arms race if it sees the U.S.

doing one.

Before you address, I guess, the initial question about the March 2021, what will we regret?

I wonder if you have an answer on that.

Or your reaction to my point about nationalization being bad for these reasons?

I don't know.

It already exists.

Yeah.