For context, here’s the one time in the interview I mention “AI risk” (quoting 2 earlier paragraphs for context):
Paul Christiano: I don’t know, the future is 10% worse than it would otherwise be in expectation by virtue of our failure to align AI. I made up 10%, it’s kind of a random number. I don’t know, it’s less than 50%. It’s more than 10% conditioned on AI soon I think.
[...]
Asya Bergal: I think my impression is that that 10% is lower than some large set of people. I don’t know if other people agree with that.
Paul Christiano: Certainly, 10% is lower than lots of people who care about AI risk. I mean it’s worth saying, that I have this slightly narrow conception of what is the alignment problem. I’m not including all AI risk in the 10%. I’m not including in some sense most of the things people normally worry about and just including the like ‘we tried to build an AI that was doing what we want but then it wasn’t even trying to do what we want’. I think it’s lower now or even after that caveat, than pessimistic people. It’s going to be lower than all the MIRI folks, it’s going to be higher than almost everyone in the world at large, especially after specializing in this problem, which is a problem almost no one cares about, which is precisely how a thousand full time people for 20 years can reduce the whole risk by half or something.
(But it’s still the case that asked “Can you explain why it’s valuable to work on AI risk?” I responded by almost entirely talking about AI alignment, since that’s what I work on and the kind of work where I have a strong view about cost-effectiveness.)
For context, here’s the one time in the interview I mention “AI risk” (quoting 2 earlier paragraphs for context):
(But it’s still the case that asked “Can you explain why it’s valuable to work on AI risk?” I responded by almost entirely talking about AI alignment, since that’s what I work on and the kind of work where I have a strong view about cost-effectiveness.)