Without thinking too deeply, I believe that this framing, i.e. one in line with AI developers are gambling with the fate of humanity for the sake of profit, and we need to stop them/ensure that their efforts don’t have catastrophic effects, for AI risk could serve as a conversational cushion for those who are unfamiliar with the general state of AI progress and with the existential risk poorly aligned AI poses.
Those unfamiliar with AI might disregard the extent of risk from AI if approached in conversation with remarks about how not only it is non-trivial that humanity might be extinguished by AI, but many researchers believe this event is highly likely to occur, even in the next 25 years. I imagine such scenarios are, for them, generally unbelievable.
The cushioning could, however, lead to people trying to think about AI risk independently or to them searching for more evidence and commentary online, which might subsequently lead to them to the conclusion that AI does in fact pose a significant existential risk to humanity.
When trying to introduce the idea of AI risk to someone who is unfamiliar with it, it’s probably a good idea to give an example of a current issue with AI, and then have them extrapolate. The example of poorly designed AI systems being used by corporations for click-through, as covered in the introduction of Human Compatible, seems good to use in your framing of AI safety as a public good. Most people are familiar with the ills of algorithms designed for social media, so it is not a great step to imagine researchers designing more powerful AI systems that are deleterious to humanity via a similar design issue but at a much more lethal level:
They aren’t particularly intelligent, but they are in a position to affect the entire world because they directly influence billions of people. Typically, such algorithms are designed to maximize click-through, that is, the probability that the user clicks on presented items. The solution is simply to present items that the user likes to click on, right? Wrong. The solution is to change the user’s preferences so that they become more predictable. A more predictable user can be fed items that they are likely to click on, thereby generating more revenue. People with more extreme political views tend to be more predictable in which items they click on.
Without thinking too deeply, I believe that this framing, i.e. one in line with AI developers are gambling with the fate of humanity for the sake of profit, and we need to stop them/ensure that their efforts don’t have catastrophic effects, for AI risk could serve as a conversational cushion for those who are unfamiliar with the general state of AI progress and with the existential risk poorly aligned AI poses.
Those unfamiliar with AI might disregard the extent of risk from AI if approached in conversation with remarks about how not only it is non-trivial that humanity might be extinguished by AI, but many researchers believe this event is highly likely to occur, even in the next 25 years. I imagine such scenarios are, for them, generally unbelievable.
The cushioning could, however, lead to people trying to think about AI risk independently or to them searching for more evidence and commentary online, which might subsequently lead to them to the conclusion that AI does in fact pose a significant existential risk to humanity.
When trying to introduce the idea of AI risk to someone who is unfamiliar with it, it’s probably a good idea to give an example of a current issue with AI, and then have them extrapolate. The example of poorly designed AI systems being used by corporations for click-through, as covered in the introduction of Human Compatible, seems good to use in your framing of AI safety as a public good. Most people are familiar with the ills of algorithms designed for social media, so it is not a great step to imagine researchers designing more powerful AI systems that are deleterious to humanity via a similar design issue but at a much more lethal level: