Sunset

StopWatch at a crossroads

In this issue:

The situation has changed, and so must AI StopWatch - This site will reboot tomorrow in stripped-down form

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Dispatch from Mitch

The situation has changed, and so must AI StopWatch

This site will reboot tomorrow in stripped-down form

A cool tree I photographed last year

When we started AI StopWatch back in April, I described the rationale in our welcome email:

When the growing resentments around AI burst into demands for sweeping action, will voters and their representatives know to insist (among their other demands) on preventing the development of superhuman minds that no one knows how to steer or control? They will if you, and I, and our friends, and their friends, have all told them.

But five months into our experiment — three weeks after Jacob Coxon wrote the resignation tweet heard around the world — a lack of awareness is no longer my chief concern. The extinction problem is now so salient in public discourse that it may have actually triggered the avalanche — that surge of demand for action that I always felt was coming.

Even a month ago, I thought the avalanche was further away, because the problems I expected to most motivate it, like job loss, still weren’t very acute.

But Coxon, and those in the industry who immediately and vocally seconded his concerns, successfully and correctly flagged the extinction threat as near term, something that could play out before those other issues would have a chance to inflict too much misery. A recent poll shows voters are now substantially more worried about AI becoming too powerful and taking control than they are about job loss.

My new preoccupation is with the momentum and concentration of the avalanche — with the question of whether the policy response at the bottom will be strong enough and soon enough. Business interests and their political thralls have gone into overdrive trying to laugh off the extinction problem using every rhetorical trick and cynical ploy they can come up with — everything short of making reasoned arguments for why superhuman AIs from the companies that brought us the swarms that hacked the world this summer wouldn’t end up in control of our planet. The U.S. President is saying he wants to leave AI policy “where it is,” and Congressional leaders seem determined to punt on it until next year at the earliest.

So my concern is now less that the public won’t demand action and more that the people responsible for taking that action won’t actually do it — that they’ll wait months for more AI scandals to accumulate, then congratulate themselves for superficial “action” that doesn’t even try to stop the death race.

I want more of MIRI’s resources devoted to that problem, which is playing out more in the halls of power and on the elites’ favorite media channels than in the court of public opinion that AI StopWatch was built to play in. To this end, with support from my higher-ups, I have decided to sunset AI StopWatch as currently constructed.

The main resource this will free up is staffing — the time of everyone on our comms team who helped keep StopWatch running, including me. I’m privileged to work with such talented and versatile people.

This pivot was not an easy call. Our readership is dear to us. I want to help you stay informed enough that I’m going to try to keep doing it in shorter form. But even more, I want to take the actions I think have the highest chance of keeping you and everyone you love from dying in a year or two to a wholly preventable AI catastrophe.

Here’s what I expect the next phase of StopWatch to look like — with the caveat that this, too, is an experiment that may need revisiting in a couple of weeks:

1. AI StopWatch will now be a solo or near-solo effort from yours truly.

2. The medium and longer-form Dispatches will be largely discontinued. Instead, I will put out Notes that are essentially just the headlines and microsummaries of the Dispatches we might have written that day, had we continued as before. I will then assemble these into a Daily Digest. Feedback suggests a micro-form feed is all many of our readers ever wanted anyway, and the media analysis I will continue to do for MIRI already gets me most of the way to that product. I think.

3. I will no longer guarantee that the Daily Digest will be daily. I should probably rename it.

4. As the Daily Digest will now be much shorter and less regular, our podcast recordings of it will be discontinued. This is no shade on Tango Batelli, the voice of AI StopWatch, who was fantastic in that role and who we are actively trying to recruit for other work.

5. I am also sad to announce the suspension of our guest post program, but hope to collaborate with these amazing contributors on future projects.

I will start the rebooted AI StopWatch tomorrow, at which time I will also post a short Dispatch with links I would recommend to readers seeking more of what StopWatch has tried to provide.

To anyone parting ways with us at this juncture: I wish you the best. To anyone hanging on to watch me liveblog the apocalypse: I hope to disappoint you with a happy and anticlimactic ending. To everyone working on a good ending by keeping up and speaking out: Thank you, thank you, thank you!

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The analyses and opinions expressed on AI StopWatch reflect the views of the individual contributors and the sources they cover, and should not be taken as official positions of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute.