I’ve heard this critique lobbed around a fair bit in AI safety circles: “{some org} is bad at philosophy”. What does this mean? I’ve heard this both from collaborators in person and on LW. A decent number of times, this critique has been directed at Anthropic. I’ll apologize for how vague (and unclear) this post is in advance but does anyone have any idea what people are getting at when they say this? It is usually an unmotivated statement too (at least in my judgement) and a statement meant to critique an organization’s approach to AI safety.
You might take a look at Wei Dai’s writing on metaphilosophy. He has a specific view that isn’t shared by everyone on this site. But a core part of his view is that “a powerful AI (or human-AI civilization) guided by wrong philosophical ideas would likely cause astronomical (or beyond astronomical) waste.”
I’ve heard this critique lobbed around a fair bit in AI safety circles: “{some org} is bad at philosophy”. What does this mean? I’ve heard this both from collaborators in person and on LW. A decent number of times, this critique has been directed at Anthropic. I’ll apologize for how vague (and unclear) this post is in advance but does anyone have any idea what people are getting at when they say this? It is usually an unmotivated statement too (at least in my judgement) and a statement meant to critique an organization’s approach to AI safety.
You might take a look at Wei Dai’s writing on metaphilosophy. He has a specific view that isn’t shared by everyone on this site. But a core part of his view is that “a powerful AI (or human-AI civilization) guided by wrong philosophical ideas would likely cause astronomical (or beyond astronomical) waste.”