“Pausing AI at human level seems harder than pausing ASAP” by MichaelDickens

Cross-posted from my website.

Some people think we should pause AI, but not now. They say we should wait until AI reaches human level, [1] because:

• It's not (catastrophically) dangerous until after then.
• Human-level AI will help us do safety research.

Alternatively, other people (like me) think we should pause AI as soon as possible.

Katja Grace wrote a nice concise case for pausing ASAP. I have something I'd like to add: pausing at human level seems harder than pausing ASAP. [2]

Pausing ASAP sounds hard. It will be hard to get international coordination around an AI pause, and implementing a pause sounds hard even if we can agree to it in principle. But pausing ASAP still seems easier than pausing at human-level AI, for several reasons:

• Human-level AI is highly economically valuable, and therefore there is a great temptation to keep going. The monetary incentive to build increasingly-powerful AI will be intense, and industry lobbyists really won't want to pause AI development. It seems hard to pause when the economic incentive to continue is so great.
• If AI is smart enough to accelerate safety work, then [...]

The original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:
July 13th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tC463N9mHcmimQ5dZ/pausing-ai-at-human-level-seems-harder-than-pausing-asap

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.