Upcoming AI regulations are likely to make for an unsafer world

even the very vague general notion that the government is regulating at all could maybe help make investment in AI more frisky, which is a good thing.

the main risk i'm worried about is that it brings more attention to AI and causes more people to think of clever AI engineering tricks.

Did you actually mention a downside vs. no regulation?

I think this is a vitally important question that we should be discussing.

The best argument I've heard is that regulation slows down progress even when it's not well done.

Regulatory capture is a real thing, but even that would limit the number of companies developing advanced AI.

I tend to agree with the underlying model of human aggregate behavior called "governments".  There's enough capture and manipulation to make most regulation rather ineffective.  

HOWEVER, that's not evenly distributed - there's a lot of wasteful or neutral regulation, a bit of negative-value, and a bit of positive.  It's not clear to me that AI regulation will be net-harmful.  It's likely to have the same mix that other regulation has of annoying, useless, and wrong-headed with a few nuggets of actual improvement.  By the nature of AI risk, if one of those nuggets lands well, it could be massively positive.   

Regulations are needed to keep people and companies from burning the commons, and to create more commons.

I would add that in modern society, the state is the entity tasked with protecting the commons because private for-profit entities don't have an incentive to do this (and private not-for-profit entities don't have the power). Moreover, it seems obvious to me that stopping dangerous AI should be considered a part of this commons-protecting. 

You are correct that the state's commons-protecting-function has often been limited and perverted by private actors quite a few times in history, notably in the 20-40 years in the US. The phenomenon, regulatory capture, corruption and so-forth, have indeed damaged the commons. Sometimes these perversions of the state's function has allow the protections to be simply discarded while other time large enterprises to impose a private tax on regulator activity while still accepting some protections. In the case of FAA, for example, while the 737 Max debacle shows all sort of dubious regulatory capture, broadly air travel is highly regulated and that regulation has made it overall extremely safe (if only it could be made pleasant now). 

So it's quite conceivable given the present qualities of state regulation that regulating AI indeed might not do much or any good. But as others have note, there's no reason to claim the results would be less safety. Your claim seems to lean too heavily on "government is bad" rhetoric. I'd say "government weak/compromised" is a better description. 

Even, the thing with the discussion of regulatory capture is none of the problems describe here give the slightest indication that there is some other entity that could replace the state's commons-protecting function. Regulatory capture is only a problem because we trust the capturing entities less than the government. That is to say: if someone is aiming for the prevention of AI-danger, including AI-doom/X-risk, that someone wants a better state, a state capable of independent judgement and strong, well-considered regulation. That means either replacing the existing state or improving the given one and my suspicion is most would prefer improving the given state(s). 

AI Regulation will make the problem worse seems like a very strong statement that is unsupported by your argument. Even in your scenario where large training runs are licensed this will make things more expensive, increase the cost of training runs, and generally slow things down, particularly if it prevents smaller AI companies from pushing the frontier of research. 

To take your example of GDPR, the draft version of the EU's AI Act seems so convoluted that it will cost companies a lot of money to comply and make investing in small AI startups more risky. Even though the law is aimed at issues like data privacy and bias, the costs of compliance will likely result in slower development (and based on the current version less open-source models) since resources will need to be diverted away from capabilities work into compliance & audits.