Aschenbrenner on the few who matter
Aschenbrenner frames AGI as being handled by a tiny in-group of insiders — a framing at odds with treating it as a global collective action problem.
Not a crack team, just "a few folks behind the scenes" — and by the end of the piece that few folks turns out to be Aschenbrenner's own social circle. Worth noticing as a move: the claim starts as a debunking of comic-book competence and ends as a claim that he and his buddies are the ones who count. If AGI is a collective action problem at global scale, "me and my buddies" is not who has to solve it — Mancur Olson and the scale problem say otherwise.
Refs: Aschenbrenner on pausing AI Scale limit
Excerpt
But the scariest realization is that there is no crack team coming to handle this. As a kid you have this glorified view of the world, that when things get real there are the heroic scientists, the uber-competent military men, the calm leaders who are on it, who will save the day. It is not so. The world is incredibly small; when the facade comes off, it's usually just a few folks behind the scenes who are the live players, who are desperately trying to keep things from falling apart.
Right now, there's perhaps a few hundred people in the world who realize what's about to hit us, who understand just how crazy things are about to get, who have situational awareness. I probably either personally know or am one degree of separation from everyone who could plausibly run The Project. The few folks behind the scenes who are desperately trying to keep things from falling apart are you and your buddies and their buddies. That's it. That's all there is.
— Leopold Aschenbrenner, Situational Awareness (2024), https://situational-awareness.ai/
