List of arguments against working on AI safety

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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."