They’ve never had the conversation because our field under-invests in having it. Status rewards research over advocacy (~3.6 researchers per advocate in US AI safety); many organizations self-censor; funders treat repetition as redundancy, even though repetition is how anyone actually gets convinced. Meanwhile, the industry secured 7× as many meetings with the European Commission on AI as civil society (2023).
This is a great point. AI safety spawned from tech communities, and a lot of the people in the field have backgrounds in CS, etc. because that’s what predisposes you toward understanding the risk. But that social background / group is inherently going to valorize technical work, research, etc. over talking to people and trying to change minds, because that’s the way tech fields have seemingly worked for the past several decades. The most common story about tech is ‘if you build it they will come’—if you invent the computer or the smartphone, you also invent the market for the computer or the smartphone, because people just realize that it will improve their lives in crazy ways and want one.
But there are marketing budgets behind these things. The sad truth is that empirics need to be socially leveraged to be made meaningful. Technology diffuses socially, it’s not a story of a million individual realizations that the IPhone will marginally improve their happiness/productivity, but a sprawling and expanding network of people who buy it because their friend bought it and likes it. The same is true for AI safety. Yes, the empirics existing is important, but just the empirics existing isn’t going to cause awareness to spread.
Maybe I’m oversimplifying the view of tech folks, but that’s how they often seem to me.
This is a great point. AI safety spawned from tech communities, and a lot of the people in the field have backgrounds in CS, etc. because that’s what predisposes you toward understanding the risk. But that social background / group is inherently going to valorize technical work, research, etc. over talking to people and trying to change minds, because that’s the way tech fields have seemingly worked for the past several decades. The most common story about tech is ‘if you build it they will come’—if you invent the computer or the smartphone, you also invent the market for the computer or the smartphone, because people just realize that it will improve their lives in crazy ways and want one.
But there are marketing budgets behind these things. The sad truth is that empirics need to be socially leveraged to be made meaningful. Technology diffuses socially, it’s not a story of a million individual realizations that the IPhone will marginally improve their happiness/productivity, but a sprawling and expanding network of people who buy it because their friend bought it and likes it. The same is true for AI safety. Yes, the empirics existing is important, but just the empirics existing isn’t going to cause awareness to spread.
Maybe I’m oversimplifying the view of tech folks, but that’s how they often seem to me.