I totally buy “there are lots of good sensible AI ethics people with good ideas, we should co-operate with them”. I don’t actually think that all of the criticisms of EA from the harshest critics are entirely wrong either. It’s only the idea that “be co-operative” will have much effect on whether articles like this get written and hostile quotes from some prominent AI ethics people turn up in them, that I’m a bit skeptical of. My claim is not “AI ethics bad”, but “you are unlikely to be able to persuade the most AI hostile figures within AI ethics”.
Sure, I agree with that. I also have parallel conversations with AI ethics colleagues—you’re never going to be able to make much headway with a few of the most hardcore safety people that your justice/bias etc work is anything but a trivial waste of time; anyone sane is working on averting the coming doom.
Don’t need to convince everyone; and there will always be some background of articles like this. But it’ll be a lot better if there’s a core of cooperative work too, on the things that benefit from cooperation.
I totally buy “there are lots of good sensible AI ethics people with good ideas, we should co-operate with them”. I don’t actually think that all of the criticisms of EA from the harshest critics are entirely wrong either. It’s only the idea that “be co-operative” will have much effect on whether articles like this get written and hostile quotes from some prominent AI ethics people turn up in them, that I’m a bit skeptical of. My claim is not “AI ethics bad”, but “you are unlikely to be able to persuade the most AI hostile figures within AI ethics”.
Sure, I agree with that. I also have parallel conversations with AI ethics colleagues—you’re never going to be able to make much headway with a few of the most hardcore safety people that your justice/bias etc work is anything but a trivial waste of time; anyone sane is working on averting the coming doom.
Don’t need to convince everyone; and there will always be some background of articles like this. But it’ll be a lot better if there’s a core of cooperative work too, on the things that benefit from cooperation.
My favourite recent example of (2) is this paper:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2302.10329.pdf
Other examples might include my coauthored papers with Stephen Cave (ethics/justice), e.g.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3278721.3278780
Another would be Haydn Belfield’s new collaboration with Kerry McInerney
http://lcfi.ac.uk/projects/ai-futures-and-responsibility/global-politics-ai/
Jess Whittlestone’s online engagements with Seth Lazar have been pretty productive, I thought.