High Risk events are typically in the tails of probability and outcome. They are both rare and bad. On top of all the usual problems of deliberating on contentious topics, you ADDITIONALLY have a situation where merely to have productive discussions you likely need a high level of quantitative epistemic “wisdom” but there is not such a high barrier to entry for discussion of these issues (nor should their be, because bad outcomes affect people!).
My heuristic for this has been to travel down two branches: a) focus on singular events that actually happen and study the reaction to that even (i.e. the back propagation to the policy weights in RL speak) b) focus on still bad but less bad and more common events. For example, instead of focussing on terrible crimes, look at fly tipping and antisocial behaviour and non-crime unpleasant interactions.
Bringing this into the AI fold, I was thinking that perhaps instead of hyper-focussing on “AI eradicating humans” or whatever the big X stands for in any discussion, focus instead on things that are already quite bad and are almost certainly happening today with AI and AI platforms.
The example I had in mind here, is that AI and AI platforms appear to be doing exactly what social networks have done over the last decade or two: keep humans on the platform. The h2h problem (human to human) feels like it is massively underserved.
I understand everyone at Big AI X, Y, Z is working furiously to make models better, to stop models from getting dangerer etc … and that nobody is being incentivized to solve the h2h problem. One can come up with lots of explanations for why this is and claim no it is “not the AI” doing this emergently bad thing, but ultimately as AI is used to build it’s own platform and business and accrue more and more data and state I think we should begin to think about this.
It doesn’t sound new and sexy of course because it’s the same bad incentives that dating apps have. But it’s now embedded in a self improving swarm of agents and humans bundled in with capital. So it is kind of a different beast.
This quick take should probably be unbundled into two points. a) the “find a smaller, less contentious, less rare, less bad problem that you can not yet solve” b) AI safety is, at least sometimes, at the wrong level of granularity (the agent and not the institution/legal entity).
High Risk events are typically in the tails of probability and outcome. They are both rare and bad. On top of all the usual problems of deliberating on contentious topics, you ADDITIONALLY have a situation where merely to have productive discussions you likely need a high level of quantitative epistemic “wisdom” but there is not such a high barrier to entry for discussion of these issues (nor should their be, because bad outcomes affect people!).
My heuristic for this has been to travel down two branches: a) focus on singular events that actually happen and study the reaction to that even (i.e. the back propagation to the policy weights in RL speak) b) focus on still bad but less bad and more common events. For example, instead of focussing on terrible crimes, look at fly tipping and antisocial behaviour and non-crime unpleasant interactions.
Bringing this into the AI fold, I was thinking that perhaps instead of hyper-focussing on “AI eradicating humans” or whatever the big X stands for in any discussion, focus instead on things that are already quite bad and are almost certainly happening today with AI and AI platforms.
The example I had in mind here, is that AI and AI platforms appear to be doing exactly what social networks have done over the last decade or two: keep humans on the platform. The h2h problem (human to human) feels like it is massively underserved.
I understand everyone at Big AI X, Y, Z is working furiously to make models better, to stop models from getting dangerer etc … and that nobody is being incentivized to solve the h2h problem. One can come up with lots of explanations for why this is and claim no it is “not the AI” doing this emergently bad thing, but ultimately as AI is used to build it’s own platform and business and accrue more and more data and state I think we should begin to think about this.
It doesn’t sound new and sexy of course because it’s the same bad incentives that dating apps have. But it’s now embedded in a self improving swarm of agents and humans bundled in with capital. So it is kind of a different beast.
This quick take should probably be unbundled into two points. a) the “find a smaller, less contentious, less rare, less bad problem that you can not yet solve” b) AI safety is, at least sometimes, at the wrong level of granularity (the agent and not the institution/legal entity).