I think there’s a good case for AI safety having a pretty good counterfactual effect on a bunch of productive areas, but obviously that’s depends on a lot of details and there’s plenty of room for debate. I think a stronger line of critique could be that early-mid AI safety efforts/thinking made the frontier race start earlier, go faster, and be more intense (e.g. roles in getting key frontier leaders obsessed, introducing Deepmind cofounders, boosting OpenAI’s founding, etc). I haven’t interrogated that history to know where to come down, but it’s a plausible way that the whole of AI safety has been net-negative. (This claim doesn’t really detract from future impact of AI safety though, if the cat’s out of the bag)
I think there’s a good case for AI safety having a pretty good counterfactual effect on a bunch of productive areas, but obviously that’s depends on a lot of details and there’s plenty of room for debate.
I think a stronger line of critique could be that early-mid AI safety efforts/thinking made the frontier race start earlier, go faster, and be more intense (e.g. roles in getting key frontier leaders obsessed, introducing Deepmind cofounders, boosting OpenAI’s founding, etc). I haven’t interrogated that history to know where to come down, but it’s a plausible way that the whole of AI safety has been net-negative. (This claim doesn’t really detract from future impact of AI safety though, if the cat’s out of the bag)