Increasing awareness increases resources through virtue of sheer volume. The more people hear about AI safety, the more likely someone resourceful and amenable hears about AI safety.
This is a good sentiment, but ‘resource gathering’ is an instrumentally convergent strategy. No matter what researchers end up deciding we should do, it’ll probably be best done with money and status on our side.
Politicisation is not a failure mode, it’s an optimistic outcome. Politicized issues get money. Politicized issues get studied. Other failure modes might be that we increase interest in AI in general and result in destructive AI being generated more rapidly, but there’s already a massive profit motive in that direction, so I don’t know if we can really contribute in that direction. Most other ‘failure modes’ which involve ‘bad publicity’ are infinitely preferable to the current state of affairs, given you have enough dignity to be shameless.
‘Public pressure’ isn’t really a thing as far as I can tell. The public presses back. Money talks. Wheels turn. Equilibria equilibriate or something. I’m only talking about awareness.
My current plan relies on identifying a good representative for AI safety with enough clout to be taken seriously, contacting them, and then trying to get them into public discussions with rationalist-adjacent e-celebs.
I’d expect this to increase awareness for AI safety and make people who see this content more amenable to advocacy for AI safety in the future. I’d expect a minority of people who watch this content to become very interested in AI safety and try and learn more.
Assuming that I find a good advocate and succeed in getting them into a discussion with a minor celebrity, this could go wrong in the following ways:
The advocates comes across as unhinged
The advocates comes across as unlikable
The advocate cannot explain AI safety well
The advocate cannot respond to criticism well
As far as I can see, the efficacy and reliability of this plan relies entirely on the character of the advocate. Because this is being tested in a smaller corner of the internet, I think we can believe that if inexplicably results in disaster, the effect will be relatively contained, but honestly I think a pretty small amount of screening can prevent the worst of this.
The largest issue with this approach/view is that it’s not addressing the distinction between:
Increased resources for things with “AI Safety” written on them.
Increased resources for approaches that stand a chance of working.
The problem is important in large measure due to its difficulty: that we need to hit a very small target we don’t yet understand. By default, resources allocated to anything labelled “AI safety” will not be aimed at that target.
If things are politicised, it’s a safe bet they won’t be aimed at the target; politicised issues get money thrown in their general direction, but that’s not about actually solving the problem. There’s a big difference between [more money helps, all else being equal], and claiming [action x gets more money, therefore it helps]. Politicisation would have many downsides.
Likewise, even if we get more attention/money… there are potential signal-to-noise issues. Suppose that there are 20 people involved in grant allocation with enough technical understanding to pick out promising projects. Consider two cases:
They receive 200 grant applications, 20 of which are promising.
They receive 2000 grant applications, 40 of which are promising.
In case (2) there are more promising projects, but it’s not clear that grant evaluators will find more promising projects, since the signal to noise ratio will have dropped so much.
The obvious answer is to train more grant evaluators to the point where they have the necessary expertise—but this is a slow process that’s (currently) difficult to scale (though people are working on that).
You also seem to be cherry-picking the upside possibilities from increased awareness: yes, some people may start to work on or advocate for AI safety (and some small proportion of those for some useful understanding of “AI safety”). However, some people may also:
Hear about AI safety, realise that AGI is a big deal but not buy the safety arguments, and start working on AGI.
This is not a hypothetical situation, or something that only happens to people without much ability: if John Carmack can get this badly wrong, where are you getting your confidence that most people won’t?
Realise that AGI is a big deal, think that the major issues are misuse and/or ethics, and make poor decisions on that basis.
Make sure weget AGI before them...
Put in regulations that focus the ‘safety’ resources of AI companies on ticking meaningless boxes that do nothing to mitigate x-risk. (though I’d guess the default situation looks largely like this anyway)
We need to argue that it’s net positive, not simply that there would be some positive outcomes (I don’t think anyone would argue with that).
Again, I do think that there’s some communication strategy we should be using that beats the status-quo. However, it needs to be analysed carefully, and carried out carefully—with adjustment based on empirical feedback where possible. (my guess is that the best approaches would be highly targeted—not that this says much at all)
Increasing awareness increases resources through virtue of sheer volume. The more people hear about AI safety, the more likely someone resourceful and amenable hears about AI safety.
This is a good sentiment, but ‘resource gathering’ is an instrumentally convergent strategy. No matter what researchers end up deciding we should do, it’ll probably be best done with money and status on our side.
Politicisation is not a failure mode, it’s an optimistic outcome. Politicized issues get money. Politicized issues get studied. Other failure modes might be that we increase interest in AI in general and result in destructive AI being generated more rapidly, but there’s already a massive profit motive in that direction, so I don’t know if we can really contribute in that direction. Most other ‘failure modes’ which involve ‘bad publicity’ are infinitely preferable to the current state of affairs, given you have enough dignity to be shameless.
‘Public pressure’ isn’t really a thing as far as I can tell. The public presses back. Money talks. Wheels turn. Equilibria equilibriate or something. I’m only talking about awareness.
My current plan relies on identifying a good representative for AI safety with enough clout to be taken seriously, contacting them, and then trying to get them into public discussions with rationalist-adjacent e-celebs.
I’d expect this to increase awareness for AI safety and make people who see this content more amenable to advocacy for AI safety in the future. I’d expect a minority of people who watch this content to become very interested in AI safety and try and learn more.
Assuming that I find a good advocate and succeed in getting them into a discussion with a minor celebrity, this could go wrong in the following ways:
The advocates comes across as unhinged
The advocates comes across as unlikable
The advocate cannot explain AI safety well
The advocate cannot respond to criticism well
As far as I can see, the efficacy and reliability of this plan relies entirely on the character of the advocate. Because this is being tested in a smaller corner of the internet, I think we can believe that if inexplicably results in disaster, the effect will be relatively contained, but honestly I think a pretty small amount of screening can prevent the worst of this.
The largest issue with this approach/view is that it’s not addressing the distinction between:
Increased resources for things with “AI Safety” written on them.
Increased resources for approaches that stand a chance of working.
The problem is important in large measure due to its difficulty: that we need to hit a very small target we don’t yet understand. By default, resources allocated to anything labelled “AI safety” will not be aimed at that target.
If things are politicised, it’s a safe bet they won’t be aimed at the target; politicised issues get money thrown in their general direction, but that’s not about actually solving the problem. There’s a big difference between [more money helps, all else being equal], and claiming [action x gets more money, therefore it helps]. Politicisation would have many downsides.
Likewise, even if we get more attention/money… there are potential signal-to-noise issues. Suppose that there are 20 people involved in grant allocation with enough technical understanding to pick out promising projects.
Consider two cases:
They receive 200 grant applications, 20 of which are promising.
They receive 2000 grant applications, 40 of which are promising.
In case (2) there are more promising projects, but it’s not clear that grant evaluators will find more promising projects, since the signal to noise ratio will have dropped so much.
The obvious answer is to train more grant evaluators to the point where they have the necessary expertise—but this is a slow process that’s (currently) difficult to scale (though people are working on that).
You also seem to be cherry-picking the upside possibilities from increased awareness: yes, some people may start to work on or advocate for AI safety (and some small proportion of those for some useful understanding of “AI safety”).
However, some people may also:
Hear about AI safety, realise that AGI is a big deal but not buy the safety arguments, and start working on AGI.
This is not a hypothetical situation, or something that only happens to people without much ability: if John Carmack can get this badly wrong, where are you getting your confidence that most people won’t?
Realise that AGI is a big deal, think that the major issues are misuse and/or ethics, and make poor decisions on that basis.
Make sure we get AGI before them...
Put in regulations that focus the ‘safety’ resources of AI companies on ticking meaningless boxes that do nothing to mitigate x-risk. (though I’d guess the default situation looks largely like this anyway)
We need to argue that it’s net positive, not simply that there would be some positive outcomes (I don’t think anyone would argue with that).
Again, I do think that there’s some communication strategy we should be using that beats the status-quo. However, it needs to be analysed carefully, and carried out carefully—with adjustment based on empirical feedback where possible. (my guess is that the best approaches would be highly targeted—not that this says much at all)