Raye

Sometimes I feel intellectually alone in my path from deep techno optimism to ai safety. Especially when I meet someone who is like 'I read lesswrong when I was in high school and then imported myself into the bay to work on what I think is the most important problem in the world, which I so clearly saw 8 years ago' and I'm like, oh neat. I first learned about EA's by crashing a party in London a few years ago (turns out it was an EAG afterparty). However then I decided to literally build the sand gods instead. It wasn't until ~after I worked in a fab and moved to the bay that I had both the world experience and intellectual scaffolding to see things more clearly. Now I feel like 'alrighty everyone be so for real right now' and just try to do what I can to make the future go good

This reminds me of a comment by a DC insider who said one of the weirdest things about working with Silicon Valley was that if you mentioned regulating something in the normal way that milk or eggs were regulated, they would start quoting Orwell and say that surely that could only lead to dystopia. My impression is that many pharmaceuticals are currently as regulated than chips would be under Plan A. They can only be made in special government-licensed factories, the government maintains the right to inspect those factories at any time, the factories have to prove that they're only sending them to licensed pharmacies, and the pharmacies have to keep excruciating records showing that they only dispensed them to licensed customers. Has this turned into a global surveillance state, or is it such a boring part of everyday life that nobody notices? I assume the government has access to all of my financial transactions; certainly if I tried to send money to Ayatollah Khameini somebody would notice and stop it. This is creepy and probably does qualify as a global surveillance state, and crypto made a decent effort to dismantle it, and I supported that when it seemed plausible - but has anything bad beyond the obvious happened because of it? I think there's a line between "regulate AI chips as much as we regulate Xanax" and "have a global surveillance state", and Plan A keeps on the right side of it. If you disagree, you'll have to tell me which specific part of it you're worried about.