How Plan A solves our 5 biggest problems

Problem #1: Loss of Control to superintelligent AIs.

Due to the slowdown agreement, the intelligence explosion happens over the course of at least 10 years. Instead of being forced by competitive pressures to automate work and trust AIs, companies now are forced to slow down until they have a rock solid safety case. In the Plan A scenario, we have ~5 years with top expert level AI before handoff, and we could realistically get more time. If alignment ends up being hard enough that a 10 year slowdown isn’t sufficient, the infrastructure for a longer pause is set up.

Due to the transparency and access provisions in the deal, there is way more oversight of AI developers, and many more total people have the relevant access to do AI alignment work with frontier models.

(See more here).

Problem #2: AI will lead to massive concentration of power into whatever group controls the first superintelligences (if anyone).

The transparency act already helps somewhat to prevent CEOs backdooring their models. The Total Research Transparency deal then “seals the deal” to a much greater extent; any attempt at inserting a hidden agenda into your biggest and most-used models–whether initiated by a CEO or a President–would be visible to multiple world governments. The model spec transparency + algorithmic progress slowdown + Total Research Transparency deal also makes there be many companies and governments with similar levels of AI, which is great for spreading out the power more generally, not just narrowly preventing secret loyalties/agendas.

Because the intelligence explosion is now happening in a slow and drawn out way, and we’ve prevented disparities in model access, so everyone has access to the same level of AI capabilities, anyone who is getting disempowered will be able to realize that and then negotiate for a better deal. Normal people have access to smart enough AIs that they can understand the situation well, and they can vote for ethical and thoughtful politicians, who will maintain and improve the power the public has, leading to a virtuous cycle. This leads to the Citizens Dividend and space governance proposal being implemented and spreading out the power forever.

Problem #3: World War 3 risk due to superintelligences disempowering many countries, including nuclear powers.

Plan A prevents WW3 by ending the “winner take all” effects of a race to superintelligence. No longer is there a race to ASI with each side fearing what the other might do if they get there first, and with each side contemplating taking aggressive action to slow down the other side, and with one or more sides starting to freak out as they realize they are on a path towards losing. No longer are there a bunch of middle countries gradually realizing that no matter who wins, they lose, and starting to freak out also.

Problem #4: AI taking everyone’s jobs.

The reasons that unemployment is bad are that people lose their (a) income, (b) power, and (c) source of meaning. Plan A slows down AI induced job loss to a rate where the negative effects of unemployment can be mitigated.

The main reason that people need jobs is to have a source of income. Plan A addresses the loss of income via the Citizen’s Dividend. Each person gets a share of income large enough to support an extremely high quality of life.

A second reason why jobs are important is that they empower their holders. CEOs and governments are incentivized to care for people who provide economic value. However, once AIs can do all the economically relevant tasks, governments and companies lose a strong incentive to provide for their citizens/employees. See the “concentration of power section” for more.

A final reason jobs are important is that they provide meaning for many people. Here we just say that it won’t be that bad (people can get meaning in a bunch of ways, not just economically useful work! Family, friends, romance, hobbies, sports!) and that the benefits outweigh the costs. If you disagree, well, we also describe Plan S… there’s basically no way to avoid mass unemployment if you allow companies to build and deploy AIs that obsolete humans. And in particular, banning the use of AI in various professions won’t work for long.

Problem #5: AI misuse by small actors.

Widespread access to smart AI will make it trivially easy to build bioweapons (or other technology that would cause huge damage at little cost to the attacker). Terrorists, states (e.g. North Korea), or misanthropists who are motivated to cause immense harm could leverage AI to do a much larger attack than they would have otherwise.

Plan A, as part of mitigating covert projects, limits the capability of open weight models to pre-deal levels. Closed models are trained to refuse dangerous requests. In case access limitations fail, Plan A involves massive investments into biosecurity and other measures to improve the resilience of the world.

There’s an alternate approach to misuse taken in Plan B, C, and D, which is to speedrun the intelligence explosion and hope to build superintelligence that can directly take over the world, hence preventing misuse. It’s plausible that these plans look better for misuse risk than Plan A because there’s so little time for the misuse to occur before superintelligence. But this strategy imposes unacceptable levels of loss of control and concentration of power risk, and so doesn’t pass overall cost benefit.