Beyond that, I encourage all readers here to read more on the dangers of AI, and talk about them publicly. Some people might be drawn to switching careers, or otherwise starting projects that are good for the world, advocacy and otherwise. But even beyond the immediate benefits, I’m a strong believer in the power of public discourse to help with sensemaking and common understanding. Talk is far from sufficient for the challenges ahead of us, but is probably necessary. It’d be frankly embarrassing if we all sleepwalk to disaster without even bothering to make public our concerns.
I agree that we do need to talk about the concerns, but I have a very different model of how to talk about this, and a big reason for this is I basically don’t believe in the power of public discourse to help with sense-making/common understanding, and a large portion of why this happens is that the public has a conspiratorial mindset in the way Rob Bensinger explains, and genuinely believe that AI is pure hype/fakery, no matter what real-world achievements exist (this has been unfortunately well shown by the warning shot of Huggingface being hacked by OpenAI.)
The main update that we should make is that it’s possible to make Congress/the elites sane on this topic, and we don’t need our cause to be popular to get good laws (which is good here.)
So we absolutely do need to get political will, but we generally should target Congress/The Presidency first, rather than the general public.
I think I both have a slightly higher opinion of the public than you, and also I think I have a significantly higher standard/prior for my Substack readers than the conspiratorial public (I think I did a random sample at some point and thought my readers were on average slightly better than ACX readers).
That said, both the top comments of my post so far are from conspiratorial people so you win some Bayes points here, unfortunately. :/
I agree that we do need to talk about the concerns, but I have a very different model of how to talk about this, and a big reason for this is I basically don’t believe in the power of public discourse to help with sense-making/common understanding, and a large portion of why this happens is that the public has a conspiratorial mindset in the way Rob Bensinger explains, and genuinely believe that AI is pure hype/fakery, no matter what real-world achievements exist (this has been unfortunately well shown by the warning shot of Huggingface being hacked by OpenAI.)
The main update that we should make is that it’s possible to make Congress/the elites sane on this topic, and we don’t need our cause to be popular to get good laws (which is good here.)
So we absolutely do need to get political will, but we generally should target Congress/The Presidency first, rather than the general public.
I think I both have a slightly higher opinion of the public than you, and also I think I have a significantly higher standard/prior for my Substack readers than the conspiratorial public (I think I did a random sample at some point and thought my readers were on average slightly better than ACX readers).
That said, both the top comments of my post so far are from conspiratorial people so you win some Bayes points here, unfortunately. :/