Pausing AI at human level seems harder than pausing ASAP

By MichaelDickens @ 2026-07-13T17:19 (+17)

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 it's also smart enough to accelerate improvements in AI capabilities. And it will probably be disproportionately good at the latter: capabilities improvements are easy to measure, and AI tends to be disproportionately good at easily measurable tasks. (Recent AI models have seen bigger improvements in math and coding abilities than in writing or philosophy.) If AI R&D used to require a team of PhDs, and now all it requires is someone in a garage with access to the latest AI model, then it's harder to enforce a pause because clandestine AI research is harder to catch.
• This next argument is more about a unilateral pause than a coordinated pause, but: Some say that the "good" AI developers need to push the frontier to maintain their lead, and that they should wait until the last minute to burn their lead to work on safety. Burning their lead at the end provides the maximum uplift from AI-assisted safety work. However, AI developers always face a choice between an uncertain downside (keep going, and possibly kill everyone) vs. a certain downside (pause, crater your profit potential, and possibly some other developer kills everyone anyway). I cannot foresee them making a rational risk assessment under those circumstances. There is too much pressure to distort their beliefs in favor of continuing to push the frontier.
• If we had technology that could replace human labor, but it's cheaper, faster, and can be copied as many times as one wants, how would that change the economy and society? I don't know, but I bet it would change a lot. That level of disruption makes the world unpredictable. It seems risky to follow plans along the lines of, "let's wait until this technology radically transforms society, possibly making things totally unrecognizable, and then implement our plan after that. Surely it will still work!"

An important counterpoint:

• The general public does not like AI. If AI starts taking people's jobs, then people will really dislike it. The unemployment effect of AI may create enough political will to pause that it outweighs out the economic incentive effect.

I hope this final point is strong enough to make pausing much easier in the future (hopefully the near future). But that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to pause ASAP.