LW - Pivotal Acts might Not be what You Think they are by Johannes C. Mayer

Link to original article

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Pivotal Acts might Not be what You Think they are, published by Johannes C. Mayer on November 5, 2023 on LessWrong.
This article is mainly for people who have not read the
pivotal act
article on arbital or need a refresher. If you have, the most interesting section would probably be "Omnicient ML Researchers: A Pivotal Act without a Monolithic Control Structure".
Many people seem to match the concept of a "
pivotal act
" to some dystopian version of "deploy AGI to take over the world". 'Pivotal act'
means something much more specific
, though. Something, arguably, quite different. I strongly recommend you read the
original article
, as I think it is a very important concept to have.
I use the term quite often, so it is frustrating when people start to say very strange things, such as "We can't just let a powerful AI system loose on the world. That's dangerous!" as if that were the defining feature of a pivotal act.
As the original article is quite long let me briefly summarize what I see as the most important points.
Explaining Pivotal Act
An act that puts us outside of the existential risk danger zone (especially from AI), and into a position from which humanity can flourish is a pivotal act.
Most importantly that means a pivotal act needs to prevent a misaligned AGI from being built. Taking over the world is really not required per se.
If you can
prevent the creation of a misaligned AGI by creating a powerful global institution that can effectively regulate AI, then that counts as a pivotal act.
If
I could prevent a misaligned AGI from ever being deployed, by eating 10 bananas in 60 seconds, then that would count as a pivotal act too!
Preventing Misaligned AGI Requires Control
Why then, is 'pivotal act' often associated with the notion of taking over the world? Preventing a misaligned AGI from being built, is a tough problem. Efficively we need to constrain the state of the world such that no misaligned AGI can arise. To successfully do this you need a lot of control over the world. There is no way around that.
Taking over the world really means putting oneself into a position of high control, and in that sense, it is necessary to take over the world, at least to a certain extent, to prevent a misaligned AGI from ever being built.
Common Confusions
Probably, one point of confusion is that "taking over the world" has a lot of negative connotations associated with it. Power is easy to abuse. Putting an entity
[1]
into a position of great power can certainly go sideways. But I fail to see the alternative.
What else are we supposed to do instead of controlling the world in such a way that no misaligned AGI can ever be built? The issue is that many people seem to argue, that giving an entity a lot of control over the world is a pretty terrible idea,
as if
there is some better alternative we can fall back onto.
And then they might start to talk about how they are more hopeful about AI regulation as if pulling off AI regulation successfully does not require an entity that has a great deal of control over the world.
Or worse, they name some alternative proposal like figuring out mechanistic interpretability,
as if
figuring out mechanistic interpretability is identical to putting the world into a state where no misaligned AGI can arise.
[2]
Pivotal acts that don't directly create a position of Power
There are pivotal acts that don't require you to have a lot of control over the world. However, any pivotal acts I know of will still ultimately need to result in the creation of some powerful controlling structure. Starting a process that will ultimately result in the creation of the right controlling structure that can prevent misaligned AGI would already count as a pivotal act.
Human Upload
An example of such a pivotal act is uploading a human. Imagine you knew how to upload ...