I haven’t really been following the reading group, but there’s something that’s been in my head and this seems like a pretty relevant section for bringing it up. I thought about writing a discussion post about it in the past but I wasn’t sure about it.
By the principle of differential technological development, would it be valuable to make an effort to advance fields with low risks that the public associates with popular preconceptions of AI risk? I imagine that the poster child for this would be robotics. The progress has been slower than most people would intuitively expect, even more so than narrow AI, and I think that visible progress in robotics would make the public more inclined to take AI risk seriously, even though it’s probably pretty tangential. Yes, it’s Not Technically Lying, but I can’t see how any of the negative consequences of Not Technically Lying would apply in this context.
I see problems with this of course. My argument would suggest that social awareness of AGI is unconditionally good, but I wonder if it is. I wonder if there is a question of what is the optimal amount of awareness. More awareness seems to increase the probability of multipolar scenarios, and smaller, less safety conscious AGI projects. There’s less uncertainty in working on robotics but conceivably less reward as well. For this reason, the utility of working on fields that indirectly spread awareness would seem to depend on how far off AGI is, which is very uncertain. It also might not make much of a difference; awareness of AI risk actually seems to have made a huge leap since the beginning of this year, if not earlier, with the Open Letter, Elon Musk’s donation to the Future of Life Institute and his general efforts to spread awareness, and the recent series of articles on Wait But Why, among other things.
There might be other examples besides robotics; probably low risk subfields in narrow AI, which also has been making superficially scary leaps recently.
Somehow I doubt that there will all of a sudden be huge donations to the field of robotics based on this comment, but there’s little cost to writing it, so I wrote it.
I haven’t really been following the reading group, but there’s something that’s been in my head and this seems like a pretty relevant section for bringing it up. I thought about writing a discussion post about it in the past but I wasn’t sure about it.
By the principle of differential technological development, would it be valuable to make an effort to advance fields with low risks that the public associates with popular preconceptions of AI risk? I imagine that the poster child for this would be robotics. The progress has been slower than most people would intuitively expect, even more so than narrow AI, and I think that visible progress in robotics would make the public more inclined to take AI risk seriously, even though it’s probably pretty tangential. Yes, it’s Not Technically Lying, but I can’t see how any of the negative consequences of Not Technically Lying would apply in this context.
I see problems with this of course. My argument would suggest that social awareness of AGI is unconditionally good, but I wonder if it is. I wonder if there is a question of what is the optimal amount of awareness. More awareness seems to increase the probability of multipolar scenarios, and smaller, less safety conscious AGI projects. There’s less uncertainty in working on robotics but conceivably less reward as well. For this reason, the utility of working on fields that indirectly spread awareness would seem to depend on how far off AGI is, which is very uncertain. It also might not make much of a difference; awareness of AI risk actually seems to have made a huge leap since the beginning of this year, if not earlier, with the Open Letter, Elon Musk’s donation to the Future of Life Institute and his general efforts to spread awareness, and the recent series of articles on Wait But Why, among other things.
There might be other examples besides robotics; probably low risk subfields in narrow AI, which also has been making superficially scary leaps recently.
Somehow I doubt that there will all of a sudden be huge donations to the field of robotics based on this comment, but there’s little cost to writing it, so I wrote it.