Live disagreements with people around me

I’m pretty interested in conveying the costs of letting AI development proceed unchecked to the general public. In relation to this, I feel like I run into a lot of disagreements with people around me. Misc very quickly written points on which my own impression has seemed very different from others in recent months: 1. It’s way, way, way more important that we stop dangerous AI soon than that we ensure that we don’t stop AI too much I have the sense the sophisticated and worldly position here is to be very concerned about ‘over-regulation’ and about not doing exactly the right regulations. But it’s an obvious pragmatic fact that the stakes of overregulation are minuscule compared to the stakes of underregulating here. And the stakes of mis-regulation are very often going to be unintended slowing, which is in the same bucket. 2. If we stopped AI development, the risk of not starting up again for an extremely long time is low This one just feels kind of crazy to me, like I may be missing something. In combination with the above point, it feels like if I met someone who was on fire, and they didn’t want me to put out the fire, in case they couldn’t figure out how to get warm again, ever. Like, forever is a long time, and if this thing is so great, you’re probably not going to forget about it! It’s like you think the current instantiation of yourself (or society) is so much more agentic than your future selves, that it’s worth huge costs to keep power in the current version’s hands. 3. Getting the public involved is not very dangerous Some people seem to think of the public as like a kind of wild and crazy god one could awaken, with very high variance results. I think this doesn’t give them nearly enough credit. While I disagree with the public on quite a lot of points, I think disagreements are a lot more salient than agreements. We might disagree a lot on exactly how the FDA proceeds or who gets in how much trouble for doing what with which drugs. But we agree that br