Why do people react to fire alarms? It’s not just that they’re public—smoke is public too. One big factor is that we’ve had reacting to fire alarms drilled into us since childhood, a policy probably formulated after a few incidents of children not responding to fire alarms.
What this suggests is even if signals are unclear, maybe what we really need is training. If some semi-arbitrary advance is chosen, people may or may not change their behavior when that advance occurs, depending on whether they have been successfully trained to be able to change their behavior.
On the other hand, we should already be working on AI safety, and so attempting to set up a fire alarm may be pointless—we need people to already be evacuating and calling the firefighters.
Why do people react to fire alarms? It’s not just that they’re public—smoke is public too. One big factor is that we’ve had reacting to fire alarms drilled into us since childhood, a policy probably formulated after a few incidents of children not responding to fire alarms.
What this suggests is even if signals are unclear, maybe what we really need is training. If some semi-arbitrary advance is chosen, people may or may not change their behavior when that advance occurs, depending on whether they have been successfully trained to be able to change their behavior.
On the other hand, we should already be working on AI safety, and so attempting to set up a fire alarm may be pointless—we need people to already be evacuating and calling the firefighters.