EA - Against Aschenbrenner: How 'Situational Awareness' constructs a narrative that undermines safety and threatens humanity by GideonF

The Nonlinear Library

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Against Aschenbrenner: How 'Situational Awareness' constructs a narrative that undermines safety and threatens humanity, published by GideonF on July 15, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Summary/Introduction Aschenbrenner's 'Situational Awareness' (Aschenbrenner, 2024) promotes a dangerous narrative of national securitisation. This narrative is not, despite what Aschenbrenner suggests, descriptive, but rather, it is performative, constructing a particular notion of security that makes the dangerous world Aschenbrenner describes more likely to happen. This piece draws on the work of Nathan A. Sears (2023), who argues that the failure to sufficiently eliminate plausible existential threats throughout the 20th century emerges from a 'national securitisation' narrative winning out over a 'humanity macrosecuritization narrative'. National securitisation privileges extraordinary measures to defend the nation, often centred around military force and logics of deterrence/balance of power and defence. Humanity macrosecuritization suggests the object of security is to defend all of humanity, not just the nation, and often invokes logics of collaboration, mutual restraint and constraints on sovereignty. Sears uses a number of examples to show that when issues are constructed as issues of national security, macrosecuritization failure tends to occur, and the actions taken often worsen, rather than help, the issue. This piece argues that Aschenbrenner does this. Firstly, I explain (briefly and very crudely) what securitisation theory is and how it explains the constructed nature of security. Then, I explain Sears (2023)'s main thesis on why Great Powers fail to combat existential threats. This is followed by an explanation of how Aschenbrenner's construction of security seems to be very similar to the most dangerous narratives examined by Sears (2023) by massively favouring national security. Given I view his narrative as dangerous, I then discuss why we should care about Aschenbrenner's project, as people similar to him have been impactful in previous securitisations. Finally, I briefly discuss some more reasons why I think Aschenbrenner's project is insufficiently justified, especially his failure to adequately consider a pause, the fact he is overly pessimistic about international collaboration whilst simultaneously overly optimistic that AGI wouldn't lead to nuclear war, . There is lots I could say in response to Aschenbrenner, and I will likely be doing more work on similar topics. I wanted to get this piece out fairly quickly, and it is already very long. This means some of the ideas are a little crudely expressed, without some of the nuances thought out; this is an issue I hope future work will address. This issue is perhaps most egregious in Section 1, where I try to explain and justify securitisation theory very quickly, and if you want a more nuanced, in depth and accurate description of securitisation theory, (Buzan, Wæver and de Wilde, 1998) is probably the best source. Section 1- What is securitisation Everything we care about is mortal. Ourselves, our families, our states, our societies and our entire species. Threats can come that threaten each of these. In response, we allow, and often expect, extraordinary measures to be taken to combat them. This takes different forms for different issues, with the measures taken, and the audience they must be legitimised to, different. With COVID, these measures involved locking us in our homes for months. With Islamic terrorism, these involved mass surveillance and detention without trial. With the threat of communism in Vietnam, these involved going to war. In each of these cases, and countless others, it can be considered that the issue has been 'securitised'; they entered into a realm where extraordinary measures can b...