A thing I learned recently is that “safety” actually is sort of a term of art among existing platform communities (like youtube or whatever), usually bucked under “trust and safety” or “community safety”, and that it specifically refers to things that are more like pornography and racism than things like “technical AI safety.”
I think it’s probably both true that these two definitions accidentally bumped into each other, creating unintended confusion, and I think there are people getting into the AI Ethics / Safety field who are blurring the lines between technical safety problems and other domains, either because they’re confused, or haven’t heard arguments about x-risk, or have heard arguments about x-risk but rounded them to something more near-term that felt more tractable or interesting or politically expedient to them.
But, given that “safety” is a vague term in the first place, and “trust and safety”/”community safety” already exist as online-industry terms, I think it just makes sense to try and move away from using “safety” to mean “existential safety” or “technical safety”
Security strikes me as a better word than safety, ethics, or responsibility. More prestigious, and the knowledge and methods of the existing security research field is probably more relevant to addressing AI x-risks than are those of existing safety, ethics, etc fields.
“Security” for me has the connotation of being explicitely in relation to malicious adversaries, while “safety” carries the connotation of heavy industrial machinery that must be made as accident-free as possible. As an example, “boat security” would be preventing people from stealing the boat, while “boat safety” would be measures intended to prevent people from falling off the boat. AI alignment (which I consider a very good term!) strikes me to be more about the latter than the former (if you have a superintelligent adversary, it might already be too late!).
“Security” for me has the connotation of being explicitely in relation to malicious adversaries
But, like, in my view the main issue with advanced AI capabilities is that they come with an adversary built-in. This does make it fundamentally different from protecting against an external adversary, but I think the change is smaller than, say, the change from “preventing people from falling off the boat.” Like, the issue isn’t that the boat deck is going to be wet, or the sea will be stormy, or stuff like that; the issue is that the boat is thinking!
A thing I learned recently is that “safety” actually is sort of a term of art among existing platform communities (like youtube or whatever), usually bucked under “trust and safety” or “community safety”, and that it specifically refers to things that are more like pornography and racism than things like “technical AI safety.”
I think it’s probably both true that these two definitions accidentally bumped into each other, creating unintended confusion, and I think there are people getting into the AI Ethics / Safety field who are blurring the lines between technical safety problems and other domains, either because they’re confused, or haven’t heard arguments about x-risk, or have heard arguments about x-risk but rounded them to something more near-term that felt more tractable or interesting or politically expedient to them.
But, given that “safety” is a vague term in the first place, and “trust and safety”/”community safety” already exist as online-industry terms, I think it just makes sense to try and move away from using “safety” to mean “existential safety” or “technical safety”
Security strikes me as a better word than safety, ethics, or responsibility. More prestigious, and the knowledge and methods of the existing security research field is probably more relevant to addressing AI x-risks than are those of existing safety, ethics, etc fields.
“Security” for me has the connotation of being explicitely in relation to malicious adversaries, while “safety” carries the connotation of heavy industrial machinery that must be made as accident-free as possible. As an example, “boat security” would be preventing people from stealing the boat, while “boat safety” would be measures intended to prevent people from falling off the boat. AI alignment (which I consider a very good term!) strikes me to be more about the latter than the former (if you have a superintelligent adversary, it might already be too late!).
But, like, in my view the main issue with advanced AI capabilities is that they come with an adversary built-in. This does make it fundamentally different from protecting against an external adversary, but I think the change is smaller than, say, the change from “preventing people from falling off the boat.” Like, the issue isn’t that the boat deck is going to be wet, or the sea will be stormy, or stuff like that; the issue is that the boat is thinking!