It seems like people in academia tend to avoid mentioning MIRI. Has this changed in magnitude during the past few years, and do you expect it to change any more? Do you think there is a significant number of public intellectuals who believe in MIRI’s cause in private while avoiding mention of it in public?
I think this has been changing in recent years, yes. A number of AI researchers (some of them quite prominent) have told me that they have largely agreed with AI safety concerns for some time, but have felt uncomfortable expressing those concerns until very recently. I do think that the tides are changing here, with the Concrete Problems in AI Safety paper (by Amodei, Olah, et al) perhaps marking the inflection point. I think that the 2015 FLI conference also helped quite a bit.
It seems like people in academia tend to avoid mentioning MIRI. Has this changed in magnitude during the past few years, and do you expect it to change any more? Do you think there is a significant number of public intellectuals who believe in MIRI’s cause in private while avoiding mention of it in public?
I think this has been changing in recent years, yes. A number of AI researchers (some of them quite prominent) have told me that they have largely agreed with AI safety concerns for some time, but have felt uncomfortable expressing those concerns until very recently. I do think that the tides are changing here, with the Concrete Problems in AI Safety paper (by Amodei, Olah, et al) perhaps marking the inflection point. I think that the 2015 FLI conference also helped quite a bit.