Stuart Russell

I think there's still a decent chance that we can pull out of this nosedive, so to speak, that we're currently in.

Ask me again in a year, I might say, okay, we do need to press the button.

Yeah, as you can tell, I'm sort of on the fence a bit about this one.

Yeah, I think I'd probably press it.

Yeah.

What's your reasoning?

Just thinking about the power dynamics of what's happening now, how difficult it would be to get the US in particular to regulate in favor of safety.

So I think what's clear from talking to the companies is they are not going to develop anything resembling safe AGI unless they're forced to by the government.

And at the moment, the US government in particular, which regulates most of the leading companies in AI, is not only refusing to regulate, but even trying to prevent the states from regulating.

And they're doing that at the behest of a faction within Silicon Valley called the Accelerationists, who...

believe that the faster we get to AGI, the better.

And when I say best, I mean also they paid them a large amount of money.

Accelerationists.

It's another version of the race that the companies are in with each other, right?

That we, you know, we know that this race is heading off a cliff, but we can't stop.

So we're all just going to go off this cliff.

And obviously that's nuts, right?

Right.

I mean, we're all looking at each other saying, yeah, there's a cliff over there running as fast as we can towards this cliff.

We're looking at each other saying, why aren't we stopping?