AI Safety in China: Part 2

• EA, for various cultural reasons, is a toxic brand in China. It's not any single component of EA, but rather the idea of altruism itself. Ask anyone who's lived in China for and few years and they will understand where I'm coming from. I think the best way forward for AI safety in China is to disassociate with EA. Rationality is more easily accepted, but spreading related ideas is not the most effective way to address AI safety in China.

I'd like to know more about this. What's the deal with altruism in China? Why is altruism disliked?

But if I had a large bag of money

What kind of money are you talking about?

What's the likely response from the Chinese government if you would do such a project with significant funding?

Again, there's very few (<10) people working on technical alignment in China right now, and I feel a bit lost. Any advice is welcome. 

Maybe there's a backdoor approach. Instead of trying to convince the general public about the importance of alignment perhaps there's a model for creating 'alignment departments' in existing tech and AI companies. Another idea could be outreach for high school or university students that want to pursue careers in tech.

From reading Part 1 it seems the ways that we've tried to spread the message in Western countries won't work in China because of different cultural/social norms so maybe try surveying people in China on how to get the message across and incite interest and action. 

These are difficult questions, and unfortunately it's possible that the situation for AI alignment in China might be even worse than we can see here. There's a lot of really weird, secret downsides to most moves that could be made.

However, I actually do have a really, really solid recommendation that I think there's no downside for, and massive upsides. I thought about it for a while, and I think Tuning your cognitive strategies [LW · GW] might be an extremely good fit for AI safety researchers in China. These are my reasons:

1. Cognitive tuning offers human intelligence amplification in the near-term. A person tries it, and they get smarter, within a day or an hour or so. Human intelligence amplification has recently been endorsed as a potentially critical element for solving AI alignment in time; regardless of whether or not late-stage AI will give us resources to help us solve alignment [LW · GW], we are more likely to solve it in time if we have smarter alignment researchers. If we find ways to make humans smarter, that's good news across the board.
2. People in China might or might not be slightly better than westerners at paying attention to their own thoughts (the important thing is building the habit from a young age, some cultures will be better at this than others). But people in China will almost certainly be better at avoiding the risks than westerners were, because the problem with cognitive tuning is that it violates Schelling Fences [LW · GW], and people in China (and Asian cultures more generally) are probably much better at noticing and budgeting Schelling Fence violations due to an ambient conformity culture.
3. The big bottleneck with cognitive tuning is figuring out how it works and how to do it right. It's basically its own field of research, but it's at the extreme early phase with massive untapped potential. The bottleneck is that almost nobody in AI safety knows about it, and almost nobody is trying it and sharing details about how it worked and what they learned from the process. There's incredible potential for growth and incredible potential for results, no matter what country pioneers it. 
4. Human intelligence amplification, with immediate results, is something that will be broadly smiled upon in China. It's basically a startup. Nobody in the government would frown upon citizens for trying that. In fact, China might soon become a leader in neurofeedback, and this could potentially be retooled for human intelligence amplification [EA · GW].

This post is quite strange and at odds with your first one. Your own point 5 contradicts your point 6. If they're so good at taking ideas seriously, why wouldn't they respond to coherent reasoning presented by a US president? Points 7 and 8 just read like hysterical Orientalist Twitter China Watcher nonsense, to be quite frank. There is absolutely nothing substantiating that China would recklessly pursue nothing but "superiority" in AI at all costs (up to and including national suicide) beyond simplistic narratives of the CCP being a cartoon evil force seeking world domination and such.

Instead of invoking tired tropes like the Century of Humiliation, I would mention the tech/economic restrictions recently levied by the US (which are, not inaccurately, broadly seen in China as an attempt to suppress its national development, with comments by Xi to that effect). Any negotiated slowdowns in AI would have to be demonstrated to China as not to be a component of that, which it shouldn't be hard to if the US is also verifiably halting its own progress, and the AGI x-risk arguments can be clearly communicated.

Eric Hoel has written about this and his(as well as mine) impression of the reigning attitude of the Party arguably is pro-coordination. This might be strange as I take it from internally knowing that there was discussion about what to do if an AGI seemed likely - one of the answer was to immediately launch nuclear attack and make sure no one(and no machine) survives.

It's a very "brute" attitude toward alignment but there's a clear preference for humanity in charge, and the idea of machines taking the "future" from the Chinese people is seen as unacceptable.

Conversely, without AI anywhere in the world, the Party seems to think they will "win." So the game dynamics encourage them to agree to styming AI development everywhere, even if they do something more low-key in secret.

What's intriguing to me is that while the OP disagrees on a lot of possibilities for agreement, the central dynamics of competition and "brute force" remain, as well as the higher technological savvy of the Party.

Tangential point: [epistemic status: armchair speculation without expertise]

Given that the US gov has started taking AI at least seriously enough to think about the underlying hardware as relevant to national security and banning the export to China, and also given that the US is significantly dependent on Taiwan for the hardware advantage is does have... Seems really unlikely that the US would give up Taiwan to China in a treaty. Probably the US would back Taiwan substantially more strongly than it has backed Ukraine, if there was a China-Taiwan active conflict initiated. Possibly maneuvering US battleships in Taiwanese waters and such, to play at brinkmanship. I'm no expert in this, just speculating.

I think it will help if you can just be clear on what you want for yourself, China, and the world. You're worried about runaway AI, but is the answer (1) a licensing regime that makes very advanced AI simply illegal, or (2) theoretical and practical progress in "alignment" that can make even very advanced AI to be safe? Or do you just want there to be an intellectual culture that acknowledges the problem, and paves the way for all types of solutions to be pursued? If you can be clear in your own mind, about what your opinions are, then you can forthrightly express them, even as you develop a career in AI that might be more conventional to begin with. 

Concerning the rivalry between China and America, (1) and (2) have different implications. If the answer is (1), then the strategy for China is to build up its own AI capabilities within the threshold of safety, while allying with those forces in America who also want to put a safe ceiling on American AI capabilities. If the answer is (2), then the priority is for all the most advanced research efforts, to also have the most advanced safety methodologies, which is potentially an even more cooperative situation. 

Concerning the association in the West between AI safety and effective altruism, again, I think it helps to be clear in your own mind. If you perceive clearly why you reject EA but still see merit in AI safety, surely you can explain the logic of that position to someone else too.