Quintin Pope
Article
Quintin Pope is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between October 05, 2023 and January 18, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “Quintin Pope said in AI Is Centralizing By Default, Let’s Not Make It Worse”; “Quintin Pope has some good on X, including a debate with Liron Shapira”; “optimists.ai (led by … Quintin Pope)“. It most often appears alongside San Francisco, DeepMind, FDA.
Metadata
- Category: People
- Mention count: 3
- Issue count: 3
- First seen: October 05, 2023
- Last seen: January 18, 2024
Appears In
Related Pages
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- San Francisco (3 shared issues)
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- DeepMind (2 shared issues)
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- FDA (2 shared issues)
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- Holly Elmore (2 shared issues)
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- Manifold Markets (2 shared issues)
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- Nora Belrose (2 shared issues)
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- OpenAI (2 shared issues)
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- @april (1 shared issues)
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- @somefoundersalt (1 shared issues)
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- ACX (1 shared issues)
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- AI (1 shared issues)
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- AI accelerationism (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
Source: AI Policy Institute and YouGov, h/t Holly Matthew Barnett said in The Possibility Of An Indefinite AI Pause that it might be hard to control the length of a pause once started, and might drag on longer than people who expected a well-planned surgical pause might like. He points to supposedly temporary moratoria that later became permanent (eg aboveground nuclear test ban, various bans on genetic engineering) and regulatory agencies that became so strict they caused the subject of their regulation to essentially cease to happen (eg nuclear plant construction for several decades). Such an indefinite pause would either collapse in a disastrous actualization of compute overhang, or require increasingly draconian international pressure to sustain. He thinks of this as a strong argument against most forms of pause, although he is willing to consider a “licensing” system that looks sort of like regulation. Quintin Pope said in AI Is Centralizing By Default, Let’s Not Make It Worse that the biggest threat from AI is centralizing power, either to dictators or corporations. AIs are potentially more loyal flunkies than humans, and let people convert power (including political power and money) into intelligence more efficiently than the usual methods. His interest is mostly in limiting the damage, putting him skew to most of the other people in this debate. He would support regulation that makes it easier for small labs to catch up to big ones, or that limits the power-centralizing uses of AI, but oppose regulation focused on centralizing AI power into a few big, supposedly-safer corporations. Percent of population in each country saying AI has more benefits than drawbacks. Pope uses this table to suggest AI regulation would be decentralizing, since the furthest-ahead countries are the most eager to regulate. Source: Ipsos; h/t Quintin II. For a “debate”, this lacked much inter-participant engagement. Most people posted their manifesto and went home. The exception was the comments section of Nora’s post, AI Pause Will Likely Backfire. As usual, a lot of the discussion was just clarifying what everyone was fighting about, but there were also a few real fights: Gerald Monroe thought that the history of nuclear weapons suggested pauses like this were impossible (because many countries did build nuclear weapons). David Manheim thought it suggested pauses like this could work (because there were some successful arms limitation treaties, and less nuclear proliferation than would have happened without international cooperation). Manheim also brought up the successful bans on ozone-destroying CFCs and on human cloning.
Inline links: The Possibility Of An Indefinite AI Pause, AI Is Centralizing By Default, Let’s Not Make It Worse, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!0Ae8!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F165f17cd-ca63-4f54-95e4-29f53b890578_1204x1126.webp, AI Pause Will Likely Backfire, thought
Quintin Pope has some good on X, including a debate with Liron Shapira and this explanation of where he parts ways with older AI safety paradigms.
13: Related: optimists.ai (led by Nora Belrose and Quintin Pope, previously discussed here) is like e/acc, except they’ve thought about it a lot and sometimes make good arguments. I endorse them (as good people to read; I’m still not sure to what degree I agree with them). If you want to do some kind of both sides debate thing, these would be the people I would contact first.
Inline links: optimists.ai, here