I’m not an academic nor do I otherwise have much familiarity with academia careers, but I have occasionally heard people talk about the importance of incentive structures like tenure publication qualification, the ease of staying in established fields, the difficulty/opportunity cost of changing research fields later in your career, etc. Thus I think it would be helpful/interesting to look at things more from that incentive structure side of things in addition to asking “how can we convince people AI safety is important and interesting?”
I agree that the creation of incentives is a good framing for the problem. I wanted to notice some things though:
Academics often have much more freedom to research what they want, and most incentives are number of publications or citations. Since you can publish AIS papers in standard top conferences, I do not see a big problem, although I might be wrong, of course.
Changing the incentives is either more difficult (changing protocols at universities or government bodies?) or just giving money, which the community seems to be doing already.
That’s what makes me think that the academic interest is more of a bottleneck, but I am not superinformed.
I’m not an academic nor do I otherwise have much familiarity with academia careers, but I have occasionally heard people talk about the importance of incentive structures like tenure publication qualification, the ease of staying in established fields, the difficulty/opportunity cost of changing research fields later in your career, etc. Thus I think it would be helpful/interesting to look at things more from that incentive structure side of things in addition to asking “how can we convince people AI safety is important and interesting?”
I agree that the creation of incentives is a good framing for the problem. I wanted to notice some things though:
Academics often have much more freedom to research what they want, and most incentives are number of publications or citations. Since you can publish AIS papers in standard top conferences, I do not see a big problem, although I might be wrong, of course.
Changing the incentives is either more difficult (changing protocols at universities or government bodies?) or just giving money, which the community seems to be doing already. That’s what makes me think that the academic interest is more of a bottleneck, but I am not superinformed.