How major governments can help with the most important century

In a previous piece, I talked about two contrasting frames for how to make the best of the most important century:

The caution frame. This frame emphasizes that a furious race to develop powerful AI could end up making everyone worse off. This could be via: (a) AI forming dangerous goals of its own and defeating humanity entirely; (b) humans racing to gain power and resources and “lock in” their values.

Ideally, everyone with the potential to build something powerful enough AI would be able to pour energy into building something safe (not misaligned), and carefully planning out (and negotiating with others on) how to roll it out, without a rush or a race. With this in mind, perhaps we should be doing things like:

• Working to improve trust and cooperation between major world powers. Perhaps via AI-centric versions of Pugwash (an international conference aimed at reducing the risk of military conflict), perhaps by pushing back against hawkish foreign relations moves.
• Discouraging governments and investors from shoveling money into AI research, encouraging AI labs to thoroughly consider the implications of their research before publishing it or scaling it up, working toward standards and monitoring, etc. Slowing things down in this manner could buy more time to do research on avoiding misaligned AI, more time to build trust and cooperation mechanisms, and more time to generally gain strategic clarity

The “competition” frame. This frame focuses less on how the transition to a radically different future happens, and more on who's making the key decisions as it happens.

• If something like PASTA is developed primarily (or first) in country X, then the government of country X could be making a lot of crucial decisions about whether and how to regulate a potential explosion of new technologies.
• In addition, the people and organizations leading the way on AI and other technology advancement at that time could be especially influential in such decisions.

This means it could matter enormously "who leads the way on transformative AI" - which country or countries, which people or organizations.

Some people feel that we can make confident statements today about which specific countries, and/or which people and organizations, we should hope lead the way on transformative AI. These people might advocate for actions like:

• Increasing the odds that the first PASTA systems are built in countries that are e.g. less authoritarian, which could mean e.g. pushing for more investment and attention to AI development in these countries.
• Supporting and trying to speed up AI labs run by people who are likely to make wise decisions (about things like how to engage with governments, what AI systems to publish and deploy vs. keep secret, etc.)

Tension between the two frames. People who take the "caution" frame and people who take the "competition" frame often favor very different, even contradictory actions. Actions that look important to people in one frame often look actively harmful to people in the other.

For example, people in the "competition" frame often favor moving forward as fast as possible on developing more powerful AI systems; for people in the "caution" frame, haste is one of the main things to avoid. People in the "competition" frame often favor adversarial foreign relations, while people in the "caution" frame often want foreign relations to be more cooperative.

That said, this dichotomy is a simplification. Many people - including myself - resonate with both frames. But I have a general fear that the “competition” frame is going to be overrated by default for a number of reasons, as I discuss here.