Orienting to 1 year AGI timelines

Summary Timelines to superintelligence without any slowdown interventions look very short now, perhaps with a median in early 2028. AI will likely dramatically automate and accelerate AI research in 2027. This means that in a substantial share of worlds where the leading AGI company doesn’t solve alignment during an intelligence explosion, avoiding catastrophe requires aggressive pacing or a pause on development in the next 6-12 months. If this is true, by far the most promising approaches to reducing the risk of catastrophe for nontechnical people (and plausibly many technical people) seem to be: Lab advocacy: Lab-facing work that is designed to achieve aggressive pacing or a pause without government involvement in the next 6-12 months. California lobbying: Policy advocacy targeting the California state government that is designed to get a law passed or an executive order issued that implements aggressive pacing or a pause within 6-12 months. Federal lobbying: If there’s a major incident roughly an order of magnitude more severe than the Hugging Face incident in the next 6 months, then lobbying Congress or the Trump administration to respond to such an event with aggressive pacing or a pause. In my opinion, most nontechnical AI safety people are not currently pursuing theories of change that are likely to pay off in the next 6-12 months . They should probably instead do one of the three strategies I describe above (lab advocacy, California lobbying, or federal lobbying) wit…