IMO, it’s hard to get a consensus for Heuristic C at the moment even though it kind of seems obvious.
Consider that humanity couldn’t achieve a consensus around banning or not using cigarettes, leaded gasoline, or ozone-destroying chemicals, until they had done a huge amount of highly visible damage. There must have been plenty of arguments about their potential danger based on established science, and clear empirical evidence of the damage that they actually caused, far earlier, but such consensus still failed to form until much later, after catastrophic amounts of damage had already been caused. The consensus against drunk driving also only formed after extremely clear and undeniable evidence about its danger (based on accident statistics) became available.
I’m skeptical that more intentionally creating ethical design patterns could have helped such consensus form earlier in those cases, or in the case of AI x-safety, as it just doesn’t seem to address the main root causes or bottlenecks for the lack of such consensus or governance failures, which IMO are things like:
natural diversity of human opinions, when looking at the same set of arguments/evidence
lack of extremely clear/undeniable evidence of harm
democracy’s natural difficulties around concentrated interests imposing diffused harms (due to “rational ignorance” of voters and collective action problems)
Something that’s more likely to work is “persuasion design patterns”, like what helped many countries pass anti-GMO legislation despite lack of clear scientific evidence for their harm, but I think we’re all loathe to use such tactics.
It seems heuristic C applies to cigarettes, leaded gas, and ozone-destroying chemicals. If we had already had heuristic C and sufficient ethical bridges around it, we would have been much more equipped to respond to those threats more quickly. Your points 1-3 do seem like valid difficulties for the promotion of heuristic C. They may be related to some of the heuristics D-I.
I agree we need effective persuasion and perhaps persuasion design patterns, but persuasion focused on promoting heuristic C to aid in promoting AI x-safety doesn’t seem like wasted effort to me.
Consider that humanity couldn’t achieve a consensus around banning or not using cigarettes, leaded gasoline, or ozone-destroying chemicals, until they had done a huge amount of highly visible damage. There must have been plenty of arguments about their potential danger based on established science, and clear empirical evidence of the damage that they actually caused, far earlier, but such consensus still failed to form until much later, after catastrophic amounts of damage had already been caused. The consensus against drunk driving also only formed after extremely clear and undeniable evidence about its danger (based on accident statistics) became available.
I’m skeptical that more intentionally creating ethical design patterns could have helped such consensus form earlier in those cases, or in the case of AI x-safety, as it just doesn’t seem to address the main root causes or bottlenecks for the lack of such consensus or governance failures, which IMO are things like:
natural diversity of human opinions, when looking at the same set of arguments/evidence
lack of extremely clear/undeniable evidence of harm
democracy’s natural difficulties around concentrated interests imposing diffused harms (due to “rational ignorance” of voters and collective action problems)
Something that’s more likely to work is “persuasion design patterns”, like what helped many countries pass anti-GMO legislation despite lack of clear scientific evidence for their harm, but I think we’re all loathe to use such tactics.
It seems heuristic C applies to cigarettes, leaded gas, and ozone-destroying chemicals. If we had already had heuristic C and sufficient ethical bridges around it, we would have been much more equipped to respond to those threats more quickly. Your points 1-3 do seem like valid difficulties for the promotion of heuristic C. They may be related to some of the heuristics D-I.
I agree we need effective persuasion and perhaps persuasion design patterns, but persuasion focused on promoting heuristic C to aid in promoting AI x-safety doesn’t seem like wasted effort to me.