9 reasons against a near-term AI slow-down

I’ve heard more arguments in favor of a near-term [1] coordinated AI pause/slow-down [2] than arguments against. I think such questions, including complex flow-through effects, are difficult, and it’s important to really consider both sides. I am not convinced by these arguments, and feel highly uncertain as to when a slow-down would be best, but believe it most likely will be good to slow down or pause AI development at some point. Here are 10 reasons against a near-term AI slow-down: A near-term slowdown could prevent the warning shots that would make the public take AI risk more seriously. And techniques for safe near-term AI may be insufficient for advanced AI, so a near-term slow-down could give a false sense of security for handling truly dangerous AI. Slowing down too early could have an idea inoculation / boy-calls-wolf effect, where the topic becomes more politicized [3] and taken less seriously because people haven’t see anything scary enough to make them see AI as truly dangerous, and then when we really need to go slow later it’s much more difficult to get political will. Not slowing down means we have less of various types of overhang that could make things more dangerous if/when full-speed research resumes, such as: Compute overhang (if hardware is not also fully paused) and other technical advances that complement AI Progress on robotics More AI researchers joining the field Overhang of new ideas for training AI more effectively Progress in biology that lowers…