I’m skeptical that anyone with that level of responsibility and acumen has that kind of juvenile destructive mindset. Can you think of other explanations?
There’s a difference between people talking about safety in the sense of 1. ‘how to handle a firearm safely’ and the sense of 2. ‘firearms are dangerous, let’s ban all guns’. These leaders may understand/be on board with 1, but disagree with 2.
I think if someone negatively reacts to ‘Safety’ thinking you mean ‘try to ban all guns’ instead of ‘teach good firearm safety’, you can rephrase as ‘Control’ in that context. I think Safety is more inclusive of various aspects of the problem than either ‘Control’ or ‘Alignment’, so I like it better as an encompassing term.
A friend in the AI space who visited Washington told me that military leaders distinctly do not like the term “safety”.
Why not?
Because they’re interested in weapons and making people distinctly not safe.
Right, for them “alignment” could mean their desired concept, “safe for everyone except our targets”.
I’m skeptical that anyone with that level of responsibility and acumen has that kind of juvenile destructive mindset. Can you think of other explanations?
There’s a difference between people talking about safety in the sense of 1. ‘how to handle a firearm safely’ and the sense of 2. ‘firearms are dangerous, let’s ban all guns’. These leaders may understand/be on board with 1, but disagree with 2.
I think if someone negatively reacts to ‘Safety’ thinking you mean ‘try to ban all guns’ instead of ‘teach good firearm safety’, you can rephrase as ‘Control’ in that context. I think Safety is more inclusive of various aspects of the problem than either ‘Control’ or ‘Alignment’, so I like it better as an encompassing term.
Interesting. I guess I was thinking specifically about DARPA which might or might not be representative, but see Safe Documents, Safe Genes, Safe Autonomy, Safety and security properties of software, etc. etc.