I like this framing a lot. My 60 second pitch for AI safety often includes something like this. “It’s all about making sure AI benefits humanity. We think AI could develop really quickly and shape our society, and the big corporations building it are thinking more about profits than about safety. We want to do the research they should be doing to make sure this technology helps everyone. It’s like working on online privacy in the 1990s and 2000s: Companies aren’t going to have the incentive to care, so you could make a lot of progress on a neglected problem by bringing early attention to the issue.”
I like this framing a lot. My 60 second pitch for AI safety often includes something like this. “It’s all about making sure AI benefits humanity. We think AI could develop really quickly and shape our society, and the big corporations building it are thinking more about profits than about safety. We want to do the research they should be doing to make sure this technology helps everyone. It’s like working on online privacy in the 1990s and 2000s: Companies aren’t going to have the incentive to care, so you could make a lot of progress on a neglected problem by bringing early attention to the issue.”