Every so often I mention that I agree with many of the founders and technical employees at the major artificial-intelligence companies that their work stands a non-trivial chance of killing everyone.
When I do, I’m typically asked why, then, most of my posts are about other stuff — things like the upcoming midterm elections or the permitting reform bill that’s hopefully going to pass during the lame-duck session of Congress.
My answer is that while I completely respect people who feel like making a wild career pivot, most of us are going to keep working in our same basic professions. And I think that the best way that I can contribute to the world is to continue doing my job — the noble work of the generalist politics columnist — as best as I can. That means clearly stating things that I believe to be true (such as that existential risk from A.I. is real) but mostly trying to deliver a varied mix of content that is accurate and interesting and informative and induces people to continue subscribing to and sharing my work.
Intellectual influence isn’t achieved by just stacking up more words on a subject.
To influence important debates, the newsletter has to be successful. So whatever my views about what is and isn’t important, I still have to factor in considerations about running a successful newsletter.
But beyond the question of influence, there’s just something a little bit odd about believing that something is objectively very important and inferring that you must therefore try to situate yourself at the center of it.
I think sometimes about my two grandfathers who were both involved in World War II, one fighting in the Mediterranean theater and the other administering the footwear rationing system. As it happens, these turn out to have been pretty peripheral fields of endeavor in the grand scheme of the war. It would be “better” from the standpoint of being at the center of the drama to have participated in the Normandy landing rather than the invasion of Sicily.
But everybody can’t be doing the thing that is most important. The United States Navy did, in fact, need different people all around the world doing different things, not just doing the one specific thing that was most likely to get written up in the history books.
Similarly, all those troops who landed in Normandy needed boots. A whole elaborate system of shoe rationing was in place to make sure that there was plenty of rubber and leather available for military use. It sounds pretty comical to be waging war on Hitler from an office where your job is to tell civilian women how many pairs of shoes they can buy — they are definitely not making movies about those guys — but if everyone refused to do the random jobs, things would have been much worse.
It is good and correct to want to have a positive impact on the world, but an impulse to be at the center of attention or try to get your name into the histories isn’t really the same thing.
Situational awareness
To people who work on A.I. safety and just earnestly want to see it written about more because they care about it, I want to call attention to something that happened recently.
OpenAI employees used their voice and their implicit power to get Greg Brockman to stop funding the Leading the Future super PAC, which was spending against politicians who favor A.I. safety legislation and (more to the point) paralyzing a lot of legislators into not wanting to touch the subject.
Since that happened, we’ve seen OpenAI’s policy guy, Chris Lehane, making remarks on safety legislation that are really helpful and constructive. So it seems that a debate that happened inside the company about OpenAI’s political engagement has been quite fruitful and unlocked some bigger possibilities. Garrison Lovely reported that my writing played a small but real role in these debates:
On September 14, one employee revived the thread with a quote from journalist Matt Yglesias to suggest the storm wasn’t abating: “Nobody working professionally in American politics believes” that OpenAI wasn’t supporting Leading the Future.
That wasn’t just a random comment of mine.