A lot of baggage goes into the selection of a threshold for “highly accurate” or “ensured safe” or statements of that sort. The idea is that early safety work helps even though it won’t get you a guarantee. I don’t see any good reason to believe AI safety to be any more or less tractable than preemptive safety for any other technology, it just happens to have greater stakes. You’re right that the track record doesn’t look great; however I really haven’t seen any strong reason to believe that preemptive safety is generally ineffective—it seems like it just isn’t tried much.
I give some reasons here why I think that such work won’t be very effective, namely that I don’t see how one can achieve sufficient understanding to control a technology without also attaining sufficient understanding to build that technology. Of course that isn’t a decisive argument so there’s room for disagreement here.
A lot of baggage goes into the selection of a threshold for “highly accurate” or “ensured safe” or statements of that sort. The idea is that early safety work helps even though it won’t get you a guarantee. I don’t see any good reason to believe AI safety to be any more or less tractable than preemptive safety for any other technology, it just happens to have greater stakes. You’re right that the track record doesn’t look great; however I really haven’t seen any strong reason to believe that preemptive safety is generally ineffective—it seems like it just isn’t tried much.
Hi Zeke,
I give some reasons here why I think that such work won’t be very effective, namely that I don’t see how one can achieve sufficient understanding to control a technology without also attaining sufficient understanding to build that technology. Of course that isn’t a decisive argument so there’s room for disagreement here.