Difference between revisions of "List of arguments against working on AI safety"

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* [[Short-term altruist argument against AI safety]]: focusing on long-term issues (e.g. ensuring the survival of humanity over the long term) turns out not to be important, or it turns out to be too difficult to figure out how to affect the long-term future. See also [[Pascal's mugging and AI safety]].
 
* [[Short-term altruist argument against AI safety]]: focusing on long-term issues (e.g. ensuring the survival of humanity over the long term) turns out not to be important, or it turns out to be too difficult to figure out how to affect the long-term future. See also [[Pascal's mugging and AI safety]].
 
* [[Safety by default argument against AI safety]]: AI will be more or less aligned to human interests by default, possibly by analogy to things like bridges and airplanes (i.e. it's bad if bridges randomly fall down, so engineers work hard by default to ensure bridges are safe), or because the alignment problem is actually very easy (e.g. [[instrumental convergence]] does not hold so AIs will not try to manipulate humans). A special case is [[AGI skepticism argument against AI safety]].
 
* [[Safety by default argument against AI safety]]: AI will be more or less aligned to human interests by default, possibly by analogy to things like bridges and airplanes (i.e. it's bad if bridges randomly fall down, so engineers work hard by default to ensure bridges are safe), or because the alignment problem is actually very easy (e.g. [[instrumental convergence]] does not hold so AIs will not try to manipulate humans). A special case is [[AGI skepticism argument against AI safety]].
** [[AGI skepticism argument against AI safety]]: It is impossible to create a human-level or smarter-than-human-level AI, so there is no problem to solve in the first place. This is a special case of [[safety by default argument against AI safety]].
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** [[AGI skepticism argument against AI safety]]: It is impossible to create a human-level or smarter-than-human-level AI, so there is no problem to solve in the first place. This is a special case of [[safety by default argument against AI safety]]. (There's a slight variant/combination with the safety by default argument, which says that an AI system can't so quickly obtain power, so then humans will always be able to fix it or maintain control of it.<ref>https://futureoflife.org/2020/06/15/steven-pinker-and-stuart-russell-on-the-foundations-benefits-and-possible-existential-risk-of-ai/ "Namely, we can’t take into account the fantastically chaotic and unpredictable reactions of humans. And we can’t program a system that has complete knowledge of the physical universe without allowing it to do experiments and acquire empirical knowledge, at a rate determined by the physical world. Exactly the infirmities that prevent us from exploring the entire space of behavior of one of these systems in advance is the reason that it’s not going to be superintelligent in the way that these scenarios outline."</ref>)
 
** [[Non-deployment of dangerous AI systems argument against AI safety]]: It's theoretically possible to build dangerous AI systems, but we wouldn't build them or deploy them, and these systems aren't much easier to build than safe systems.
 
** [[Non-deployment of dangerous AI systems argument against AI safety]]: It's theoretically possible to build dangerous AI systems, but we wouldn't build them or deploy them, and these systems aren't much easier to build than safe systems.
 
* [[Doomer argument against AI safety]]: we are so screwed that it's not even worth working on AI safety. A variant combines this with [[safety by default argument against AI safety]], saying there are various worldviews about AI safety, and in the more optimistic ones things will very likely go right or additional effort has no effect on existential probability so it's not worth working on it, and in the more pessimistic ones things are almost surely to fail so there is no point in working on it.
 
* [[Doomer argument against AI safety]]: we are so screwed that it's not even worth working on AI safety. A variant combines this with [[safety by default argument against AI safety]], saying there are various worldviews about AI safety, and in the more optimistic ones things will very likely go right or additional effort has no effect on existential probability so it's not worth working on it, and in the more pessimistic ones things are almost surely to fail so there is no point in working on it.
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* Roman V. Yampolskiy. [https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2105/2105.02704.pdf#page=6 "AI Risk Skepticism"]. 2021. -- This paper provides a taxonomy of reasons AI safety skeptics bring up. However, I don't really like the way the arguments are organized in this paper, and many of them are very similar (I think most of them fit under what I call [[safety by default argument against AI safety]]).
 
* Roman V. Yampolskiy. [https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2105/2105.02704.pdf#page=6 "AI Risk Skepticism"]. 2021. -- This paper provides a taxonomy of reasons AI safety skeptics bring up. However, I don't really like the way the arguments are organized in this paper, and many of them are very similar (I think most of them fit under what I call [[safety by default argument against AI safety]]).
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[[Category:AI safety]]
 
[[Category:AI safety]]

Revision as of 21:20, 16 September 2021

This is a list of arguments against working on AI safety. Personally I think the only one that's not totally weak is opportunity cost (in the de dicto sense that it's plausible that a higher priority cause exists, not in the de re sense that I actually have in mind a concrete higher priority cause), and for that I plan to continue to read somewhat widely in search of better cause areas.

Buck lists a few more at https://eaforum.issarice.com/posts/53JxkvQ7RKAJ4nHc4/some-thoughts-on-deference-and-inside-view-models#Proofs_vs_proof_sketches but actually i don't think those are such good counter-arguments.

References

  • Roman V. Yampolskiy. "AI Risk Skepticism". 2021. -- This paper provides a taxonomy of reasons AI safety skeptics bring up. However, I don't really like the way the arguments are organized in this paper, and many of them are very similar (I think most of them fit under what I call safety by default argument against AI safety).
  1. https://futureoflife.org/2020/06/15/steven-pinker-and-stuart-russell-on-the-foundations-benefits-and-possible-existential-risk-of-ai/ "Namely, we can’t take into account the fantastically chaotic and unpredictable reactions of humans. And we can’t program a system that has complete knowledge of the physical universe without allowing it to do experiments and acquire empirical knowledge, at a rate determined by the physical world. Exactly the infirmities that prevent us from exploring the entire space of behavior of one of these systems in advance is the reason that it’s not going to be superintelligent in the way that these scenarios outline."