I don’t think the hostility between the near-term harm and the AI x-riskers would have been prevented by more attack rebutting Emille Torres.
The real problem is that the near-term AI harm people perceive Ai x-riskers as ignoring their concerns and actively making the near term harms worse.
Unfortunately, I think this sentiment is at least partly accurate. When Timnit got pushed out of google for pointing out near-term harms of AI, there was almost no support from the x-risk crowd (I can’t find any big name EA’s on this list, for example). This probably contributed to her current anti-EA stance.
As for real world harms, well, we can just say that openAI was started by an x-risker, and has kickstarted an AI race, causing a myriad of real world harms such as scams, art plagiarism, data theft, etc.
The way to actually fix this would be actual solidarity and bridge building on dealing with the short-term harms of AI.
I don’t want to fully re-litigate this history, as I’m more concerned about the future of OpenPhilanthropy being blindsided by a political attack (it might be low probability, but you’d think OpenPhil would be open to being concerned about low-chance high-impact threats to it)
I don’t think the hostility between the near-term harm and the AI x-riskers would have been prevented by more attack rebutting Emille Torres.
Agreed. It predated Emile’s public anti-EA turn for sure. But it was never inevitable. Indeed, supporting Timnit during her firing from Google may have been a super low-cost way to show solidarity. It might have meant that Emile and Timnit wouldn’t have become allies who have strong ideological influence over a large part of AI research space.
The way to actually fix this would be actual solidarity and bridge building on dealing with the short-term harms of AI.
There seems to have been some momentum towards more collaboration after the AI Safety Summit though. I hope the Bletchley Declaration can be an inflection point for more of this.
‘The way to actually fix this would be actual solidarity and bridge building on dealing with the short-term harms of AI.’
What would this look like? I feel like, if all you do is say nice things, that is a good idea usually, but it won’t move the dial that much (and also is potentially lying, depending on context and your own opinions; we can’t just assume all concerns about short-term harm, let alone proposed solutions, are well thought out). But if you’re advocating spending actual EA money and labour on this, surely you’d first need to make a case that stuff “dealing with the short term harms of AI” is not just good (plausible), but also better than spending the money on other EA stuff. I feel like a hidden crux here might be that you, personally, don’t believe in AI X-risk*, so you think it’s an improvement if AI-related money is spent on short term stuff, whether or not that is better than spending it on animal welfare or global health and development, or for that matter anti-racist/feminist/socialist stuff not to do with AI. But obviously, people who do buy that AI X-risk is comparable/better as a cause area than standard near-term EA stuff or biorisk, can’t take that line.
*I am also fairly skeptical it is a good use of EA money and effort for what it’s worth, though I’ve ended up working on it anyway.
This seems a little zero-sum, which is not how successful social movements tend to operate. I’ll freely confess that I am on the “near term risk” team, but that doesn’t mean the two groups can’t work together.
A simplified example: Say 30% of a council are concerned abut near term harms, and 30% are concerned about x-risk, and each wants policies passed that address their own concerns. If the two spend all their time shitting on each other for having misplaced priorities, neither of them will get what they want. But if they work together, they have a majority, and can pass a combined bill that addresses both near-term harm and AI x-risk, benefiting both.
Unfortunately, the best time to do this bridge building and alliance making was several years ago, and the distrust is already rather entrenched. But I genuinely think that working to mend those bridges will make both groups better off in the long run.
You haven’t actually addressed the main question of the previous comment: What would this bridge building look like? Your council example does not match the current reality very well.
It feels like you also sidestep other stuff in the comment, and it is unclear what your position is. Should we spend EA money (or other resources) on “short-term harms”? If yes, is the main reason because funding the marginal AI ethics research is better than the marginal bed-net and the marginal AI xrisk research? Or would the main reason for spending money on “short-term harms” that we buy sympathy with the group of people concerned about “short-term harms”, so we can later pass regulations together with them to reduce both “short-term harm” and AI x-risk.
I just read most of the article. It was not that satisfying in this context. Most of it is arguments that we should work together (which I dont disagree with).
And I imagine it will be quite hard to convince most AI xrisk people of “whether AI is closer to a stupid ‘stochastic parrot’ or on the ‘verge-of-superintelligence’ doesn’t really matter; ”. If we were to adopt Gideon’s desired framing, it looks like we would need to make sacrifices in epistemics. Related:
The relevant question isn’t “are the important harms to be prioritised the existential harms or the non-existential ones?”, “will AI be agents or not?’, nor ’will AI be stochastic parrots or superintelligence?” Rather, the relevant question is whether we think that power-accumulation and concentration in and through AI systems, at different scales of capability, is extremely risky.
Some of Gideon’s suggestion such as protest or compute governance are already being pursued. Not sure if that counts as bridge building though, because these might be good ideas anyways.
I don’t think the hostility between the near-term harm and the AI x-riskers would have been prevented by more attack rebutting Emille Torres.
The real problem is that the near-term AI harm people perceive Ai x-riskers as ignoring their concerns and actively making the near term harms worse.
Unfortunately, I think this sentiment is at least partly accurate. When Timnit got pushed out of google for pointing out near-term harms of AI, there was almost no support from the x-risk crowd (I can’t find any big name EA’s on this list, for example). This probably contributed to her current anti-EA stance.
As for real world harms, well, we can just say that openAI was started by an x-risker, and has kickstarted an AI race, causing a myriad of real world harms such as scams, art plagiarism, data theft, etc.
The way to actually fix this would be actual solidarity and bridge building on dealing with the short-term harms of AI.
I don’t want to fully re-litigate this history, as I’m more concerned about the future of OpenPhilanthropy being blindsided by a political attack (it might be low probability, but you’d think OpenPhil would be open to being concerned about low-chance high-impact threats to it)
Agreed. It predated Emile’s public anti-EA turn for sure. But it was never inevitable. Indeed, supporting Timnit during her firing from Google may have been a super low-cost way to show solidarity. It might have meant that Emile and Timnit wouldn’t have become allies who have strong ideological influence over a large part of AI research space.
I’d like to think so too, but this is a bridge that needs to build from both ends imo, as I wouldn’t recommend a unilateral action unless I really trusted the other parties involved.
There seems to have been some momentum towards more collaboration after the AI Safety Summit though. I hope the Bletchley Declaration can be an inflection point for more of this.
What do you see as the risk of building a bridge if it’s not reciprocated?
‘The way to actually fix this would be actual solidarity and bridge building on dealing with the short-term harms of AI.’
What would this look like? I feel like, if all you do is say nice things, that is a good idea usually, but it won’t move the dial that much (and also is potentially lying, depending on context and your own opinions; we can’t just assume all concerns about short-term harm, let alone proposed solutions, are well thought out). But if you’re advocating spending actual EA money and labour on this, surely you’d first need to make a case that stuff “dealing with the short term harms of AI” is not just good (plausible), but also better than spending the money on other EA stuff. I feel like a hidden crux here might be that you, personally, don’t believe in AI X-risk*, so you think it’s an improvement if AI-related money is spent on short term stuff, whether or not that is better than spending it on animal welfare or global health and development, or for that matter anti-racist/feminist/socialist stuff not to do with AI. But obviously, people who do buy that AI X-risk is comparable/better as a cause area than standard near-term EA stuff or biorisk, can’t take that line.
*I am also fairly skeptical it is a good use of EA money and effort for what it’s worth, though I’ve ended up working on it anyway.
This seems a little zero-sum, which is not how successful social movements tend to operate. I’ll freely confess that I am on the “near term risk” team, but that doesn’t mean the two groups can’t work together.
A simplified example: Say 30% of a council are concerned abut near term harms, and 30% are concerned about x-risk, and each wants policies passed that address their own concerns. If the two spend all their time shitting on each other for having misplaced priorities, neither of them will get what they want. But if they work together, they have a majority, and can pass a combined bill that addresses both near-term harm and AI x-risk, benefiting both.
Unfortunately, the best time to do this bridge building and alliance making was several years ago, and the distrust is already rather entrenched. But I genuinely think that working to mend those bridges will make both groups better off in the long run.
You haven’t actually addressed the main question of the previous comment: What would this bridge building look like? Your council example does not match the current reality very well.
It feels like you also sidestep other stuff in the comment, and it is unclear what your position is. Should we spend EA money (or other resources) on “short-term harms”? If yes, is the main reason because funding the marginal AI ethics research is better than the marginal bed-net and the marginal AI xrisk research? Or would the main reason for spending money on “short-term harms” that we buy sympathy with the group of people concerned about “short-term harms”, so we can later pass regulations together with them to reduce both “short-term harm” and AI x-risk.
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Q4rg6vwbtPxXW6ECj/we-are-fighting-a-shared-battle-a-call-for-a-different (It’s been a while since I read this so I’m not sure it is what you are looking for, but Gideon Futerman had some ideas for what “bridge building” might look like.)
I just read most of the article. It was not that satisfying in this context. Most of it is arguments that we should work together (which I dont disagree with). And I imagine it will be quite hard to convince most AI xrisk people of “whether AI is closer to a stupid ‘stochastic parrot’ or on the ‘verge-of-superintelligence’ doesn’t really matter; ”. If we were to adopt Gideon’s desired framing, it looks like we would need to make sacrifices in epistemics. Related:
Some of Gideon’s suggestion such as protest or compute governance are already being pursued. Not sure if that counts as bridge building though, because these might be good ideas anyways.