Monday AI Radar #24

Two thresholds loom on the horizon, with only a brief window of opportunity to prepare for each. On the technical front, it is plausible that we might see full automation of AI R&D this decade. Capabilities will move fast once that happens: our best chance for a good outcome is to have a robust, scalable alignment solution before we get there.Politically, AI is quickly rising in salience and is poised to be a pivotal issue in the 2028 presidential election, if not sooner. Premature salience works against the safety agenda: popular outrage is not conducive to the kind of careful, technically savvy regulation that would mitigate existential risk. Rather than rushing to raise salience by any means necessary, we should seize the present opportunity to advance good policy in a thoughtful, deliberate manner.Top pickAnton Leicht: seductive salienceThere’s a strange kind of magical thinking in some parts of the AI safety community: if we can just get politicians to pay attention to AI, surely they will enact sensible policies that make us all safer? Anton Leicht disagrees:My claim is the opposite: once an aspect of AI—its job impacts, its misuse risks, and so on—reaches high political salience, AI politics becomes volatile, captive to broader societal moods, and disconnected from the merits of the underlying policy.Some issues are simple enough that vibes-based solutions are net-positive. If you can convince politicians that air pollution is bad, they will probably pass air pollution legislation that is net positive, even if they lack a sophisticated understanding of the issue. For these issues, increasing salience is a useful strategy.But some issues—like AI safety—are sufficiently complex that they require careful technocratic solutions, not vague gestures. The Sanders / AOC data center moratorium is a good example, “an ineffective version of an ill-advised idea, a proposal so incoherent that even its would-be supporters have retreated to only defending its ability to ‘se