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

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* [[AI will solve everything argument against AI safety]]
 
* [[AI will solve everything argument against AI safety]]
 
* [[Pascal's mugging and AI safety]]: AI safety work is sketchy because it's hoping for a huge payoff that has very tiny probability, and this kind of reasoning doesn't seem to work well as demonstrated by the [[Pascal's mugging]] thought experiment. Related to the [[short-term altruist argument against AI safety]].
 
* [[Pascal's mugging and AI safety]]: AI safety work is sketchy because it's hoping for a huge payoff that has very tiny probability, and this kind of reasoning doesn't seem to work well as demonstrated by the [[Pascal's mugging]] thought experiment. Related to the [[short-term altruist argument against AI safety]].
* [[Unintended consequences of AI safety advocacy argument against AI safety]]: AI safety is important, but working on it now or advocating for people to work on it has bad effects like more people going into AI capabilities research or people thinking AI safety is full of crackpots.
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* [[Unintended consequences of AI safety advocacy argument against AI safety]]: AI safety is important, but working on it now or advocating for people to work on it has bad effects like more people going into AI capabilities research, or people thinking AI safety is full of crackpots, or worsening race dynamics around the development of AGI.
 
* [[Opportunity cost argument against AI safety]]: AI safety is important, but there is some more pressing problem for humanity (e.g. some other x-risk like [[biorisk]]s; basically something that is even more likely to kill us or arriving even sooner) or maybe some other intervention like [[values spreading]] that is more cost effective. This could be true for several reasons: [[AI timelines]] are long so something else that's big is likely to happen before then, some other concrete risk looks more promising, working on AI safety now is unproductive for now without having advanced AI systems to test safety techniques on, or some sort of 'unknown unknowns' argument that there is some [[Cause X]] that is yet to be discovered. All of the other arguments also agree with the opportunity cost argument in a sense: if you believe AI safety is not a top priority, then you believe there is some other thing that is of higher priority. So in order for the opportunity cost argument to not collapse to one of the other arguments, it seems important to believe in the importance of AI safety to at least some extent.
 
* [[Opportunity cost argument against AI safety]]: AI safety is important, but there is some more pressing problem for humanity (e.g. some other x-risk like [[biorisk]]s; basically something that is even more likely to kill us or arriving even sooner) or maybe some other intervention like [[values spreading]] that is more cost effective. This could be true for several reasons: [[AI timelines]] are long so something else that's big is likely to happen before then, some other concrete risk looks more promising, working on AI safety now is unproductive for now without having advanced AI systems to test safety techniques on, or some sort of 'unknown unknowns' argument that there is some [[Cause X]] that is yet to be discovered. All of the other arguments also agree with the opportunity cost argument in a sense: if you believe AI safety is not a top priority, then you believe there is some other thing that is of higher priority. So in order for the opportunity cost argument to not collapse to one of the other arguments, it seems important to believe in the importance of AI safety to at least some extent.
 
** [[Crowded field argument against AI safety]]: there are already enough people working on it, or there is enough momentum in the field that I personally don't need to enter the field.
 
** [[Crowded field argument against AI safety]]: there are already enough people working on it, or there is enough momentum in the field that I personally don't need to enter the field.

Revision as of 22:36, 11 October 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."