In some circles that I frequent, I’ve gotten the impression that a decent fraction of existing rhetoric around AI has gotten pretty emotionally charged. And I’m worried about the presence of what I perceive as demagoguery regarding the merits of AI capabilities and AI safety. Out of a desire to avoid calling out specific people or statements, I’ll just discuss a hypothetical example for now.
Suppose an EA says, “I’m against OpenAI’s strategy for straightforward reasons: OpenAI is selfishly gambling everyone’s life in a dark gamble to make themselves immortal.” Would this be a true, non-misleading statement? Would this statement likely convey the speaker’s genuine beliefs about why they think OpenAI’s strategy is bad for the world?
To begin to answer these questions, we can consider the following observations:
It seems likely that AI powerful enough to end the world would presumably also be powerful enough to do lots of incredibly positive things, such as reducing global mortality and curing diseases. By delaying AI, we are therefore equally “gambling everyone’s life” by forcing people to face ordinary mortality.
Selfish motives can be, and frequently are, aligned with the public interest. For example, Jeff Bezos was very likely motivated by selfish desires in his accumulation of wealth, but building Amazon nonetheless benefitted millions of people in the process. Such win-win situations are common in business, especially when developing technologies.
Because of the potential for AI to both pose great risks and great benefits, it seems to me that there are plenty of plausible pro-social arguments one can give for favoring OpenAI’s strategy of pushing forward with AI. Therefore, it seems pretty misleading to me to frame their mission as a dark and selfish gamble, at least on a first impression.
Here’s my point: Depending on the speaker, I frequently think their actual reason for being against OpenAI’s strategy is not because they think OpenAI is undertaking a dark, selfish gamble. Instead, it’s often just standard strong longtermism. A less misleading statement of their view would go something like this:
“I’m against OpenAI’s strategy because I think potential future generations matter more than the current generation of people, and OpenAI is endangering future generations in their gamble to improve the lives of people who currently exist.”
I claim this statement would—at least in many cases—be less misleading than the other statement because it captures a major genuine crux of the disagreement: whether you think potential future generations matter more than currently-existing people.
This statement also omits the “selfish” accusation, which I think is often just a red herring designed to mislead people: we don’t normally accuse someone of being selfish when they do a good thing, even if the accusation is literally true.
(There can, of course, be further cruxes, such as your p(doom), your timelines, your beliefs about the normative value of unaligned AIs, and so on. But at the very least, a longtermist preference for future generations over currently existing people seems like a huge, actual crux that many people have in this debate, when they work through these things carefully together.)
Here’s why I care about discussing this. I admit that I care a substantial amount—not overwhelming, but it’s hardly insignificant—about currently existing people. I want to see people around me live long, healthy and prosperous lives, and I don’t want to see them die. And indeed, I think advancing AI could greatly help currently existing people. As a result, I find it pretty frustrating to see people use what I perceive to be essentially demagogic tactics designed to sway people against AI, rather than plainly stating their cruxes about why they actually favor the policies they do.
These allegedly demagogic tactics include:
Highlighting the risks of AI to argue against development while systematically omitting the potential benefits, hiding a more comprehensive assessment of your preferred policies.
Highlighting random, extraneous drawbacks of AI development that you wouldn’t ordinarily care much about in other contexts when discussing innovation, such as potential for job losses from automation. This type of rhetoric looks a lot like “deceptively searching for random arguments designed to persuade, rather than honestly explain one’s perspective” to me, a lot of the time.
Conflating, or at least strongly associating, the selfish motives of people who work at AI firms with their allegedly harmful effects. This rhetoric plays on public prejudices by appealing to a widespread but false belief that selfish motives are usually suspicious, or can’t translate into pro-social results. In fact, there is no contradiction with the idea that most people at OpenAI are in it for the money, status, and fame, but also what they’re doing is good for the world, and they genuinely believe that.
I’m against these tactics for a variety of reasons, but one of the biggest reasons is that they can, in some cases, indicate a degree of dishonesty, depending on the context. And I’d really prefer EAs to focus on trying to be almost-maximally truth-seeking in both their beliefs and their words.
Speaking more generally—to drive one of my points home a little more—I think there are roughly three possible views you could have about pushing for AI capabilities relative to pushing for pausing or more caution:
Full-steam ahead view: We should accelerate AI at any and all costs. We should oppose any regulations that might impede AI capabilities, and embark on a massive spending spree to accelerate AI capabilities.
Full-safety view: We should try as hard as possible to shut down AI right now, and thwart any attempt to develop AI capabilities further, while simultaneously embarking on a massive spending spree to accelerate AI safety.
Balanced view: We should support a substantial mix of both safety and acceleration efforts, attempting to carefully balance the risks and rewards of AI development to ensure that we can seize the benefits of AI without bearing intolerably high costs.
I tend to think most informed people, when pushed, advocate the third view, albeit with wide disagreement about the right mix of support for safety and acceleration. Yet, on a superficial level—on the level of rhetoric—I find that the first and second view are surprisingly common. On this level, I tend to find e/accs in the first camp, and a large fraction of EAs in the second camp.
But if your actual beliefs are something like the third view, I think that’s an important fact to emphasize in honest discussions about what we should do with AI. If your rhetoric is consistently aligned with (1) or (2) but your actual beliefs are aligned with (3), I think that can often be misleading. And it can be especially misleading if you’re trying to publicly paint other people in the same camp—the third one—as somehow having bad motives merely because they advocate a moderately higher mix of acceleration over safety efforts than you do, or vice versa.
I encourage you not to draw dishonesty inferences from people worried about job losses from AI automation, just because:
it seems like almost no other technologies stood to automate such a broad range of labour essentially simultaneously,
other innovative technologies often did face pushback from people whose jobs were threatened, and generally there have been significant social problems in the past when an economy moves away from people’s existing livelihoods (I’m thinking of e.g. coal miners in 1970s / 1980s Britain, though it’s not something I know a lot about),
even if the critique doesn’t stand up under from-first-principles scrutiny, lots of people think it’s a big deal, so if it’s a mistake it’s surely an understandable one from someone who weighs other opinions (too?) seriously.
I think it’s reasonable to argue that this worry is wrong, I just think it’s a pretty understandable opinion to hold and want to talk about, and I don’t feel like it’s compelling evidence that someone is deliberately trying to seek out arguments in order to advance a position.
In some circles that I frequent, I’ve gotten the impression that a decent fraction of existing rhetoric around AI has gotten pretty emotionally charged. And I’m worried about the presence of what I perceive as demagoguery regarding the merits of AI capabilities and AI safety. Out of a desire to avoid calling out specific people or statements, I’ll just discuss a hypothetical example for now.
Suppose an EA says, “I’m against OpenAI’s strategy for straightforward reasons: OpenAI is selfishly gambling everyone’s life in a dark gamble to make themselves immortal.” Would this be a true, non-misleading statement? Would this statement likely convey the speaker’s genuine beliefs about why they think OpenAI’s strategy is bad for the world?
To begin to answer these questions, we can consider the following observations:
It seems likely that AI powerful enough to end the world would presumably also be powerful enough to do lots of incredibly positive things, such as reducing global mortality and curing diseases. By delaying AI, we are therefore equally “gambling everyone’s life” by forcing people to face ordinary mortality.
Selfish motives can be, and frequently are, aligned with the public interest. For example, Jeff Bezos was very likely motivated by selfish desires in his accumulation of wealth, but building Amazon nonetheless benefitted millions of people in the process. Such win-win situations are common in business, especially when developing technologies.
Because of the potential for AI to both pose great risks and great benefits, it seems to me that there are plenty of plausible pro-social arguments one can give for favoring OpenAI’s strategy of pushing forward with AI. Therefore, it seems pretty misleading to me to frame their mission as a dark and selfish gamble, at least on a first impression.
Here’s my point: Depending on the speaker, I frequently think their actual reason for being against OpenAI’s strategy is not because they think OpenAI is undertaking a dark, selfish gamble. Instead, it’s often just standard strong longtermism. A less misleading statement of their view would go something like this:
“I’m against OpenAI’s strategy because I think potential future generations matter more than the current generation of people, and OpenAI is endangering future generations in their gamble to improve the lives of people who currently exist.”
I claim this statement would—at least in many cases—be less misleading than the other statement because it captures a major genuine crux of the disagreement: whether you think potential future generations matter more than currently-existing people.
This statement also omits the “selfish” accusation, which I think is often just a red herring designed to mislead people: we don’t normally accuse someone of being selfish when they do a good thing, even if the accusation is literally true.
(There can, of course, be further cruxes, such as your p(doom), your timelines, your beliefs about the normative value of unaligned AIs, and so on. But at the very least, a longtermist preference for future generations over currently existing people seems like a huge, actual crux that many people have in this debate, when they work through these things carefully together.)
Here’s why I care about discussing this. I admit that I care a substantial amount—not overwhelming, but it’s hardly insignificant—about currently existing people. I want to see people around me live long, healthy and prosperous lives, and I don’t want to see them die. And indeed, I think advancing AI could greatly help currently existing people. As a result, I find it pretty frustrating to see people use what I perceive to be essentially demagogic tactics designed to sway people against AI, rather than plainly stating their cruxes about why they actually favor the policies they do.
These allegedly demagogic tactics include:
Highlighting the risks of AI to argue against development while systematically omitting the potential benefits, hiding a more comprehensive assessment of your preferred policies.
Highlighting random, extraneous drawbacks of AI development that you wouldn’t ordinarily care much about in other contexts when discussing innovation, such as potential for job losses from automation. This type of rhetoric looks a lot like “deceptively searching for random arguments designed to persuade, rather than honestly explain one’s perspective” to me, a lot of the time.
Conflating, or at least strongly associating, the selfish motives of people who work at AI firms with their allegedly harmful effects. This rhetoric plays on public prejudices by appealing to a widespread but false belief that selfish motives are usually suspicious, or can’t translate into pro-social results. In fact, there is no contradiction with the idea that most people at OpenAI are in it for the money, status, and fame, but also what they’re doing is good for the world, and they genuinely believe that.
I’m against these tactics for a variety of reasons, but one of the biggest reasons is that they can, in some cases, indicate a degree of dishonesty, depending on the context. And I’d really prefer EAs to focus on trying to be almost-maximally truth-seeking in both their beliefs and their words.
Speaking more generally—to drive one of my points home a little more—I think there are roughly three possible views you could have about pushing for AI capabilities relative to pushing for pausing or more caution:
Full-steam ahead view: We should accelerate AI at any and all costs. We should oppose any regulations that might impede AI capabilities, and embark on a massive spending spree to accelerate AI capabilities.
Full-safety view: We should try as hard as possible to shut down AI right now, and thwart any attempt to develop AI capabilities further, while simultaneously embarking on a massive spending spree to accelerate AI safety.
Balanced view: We should support a substantial mix of both safety and acceleration efforts, attempting to carefully balance the risks and rewards of AI development to ensure that we can seize the benefits of AI without bearing intolerably high costs.
I tend to think most informed people, when pushed, advocate the third view, albeit with wide disagreement about the right mix of support for safety and acceleration. Yet, on a superficial level—on the level of rhetoric—I find that the first and second view are surprisingly common. On this level, I tend to find e/accs in the first camp, and a large fraction of EAs in the second camp.
But if your actual beliefs are something like the third view, I think that’s an important fact to emphasize in honest discussions about what we should do with AI. If your rhetoric is consistently aligned with (1) or (2) but your actual beliefs are aligned with (3), I think that can often be misleading. And it can be especially misleading if you’re trying to publicly paint other people in the same camp—the third one—as somehow having bad motives merely because they advocate a moderately higher mix of acceleration over safety efforts than you do, or vice versa.
I encourage you not to draw dishonesty inferences from people worried about job losses from AI automation, just because:
it seems like almost no other technologies stood to automate such a broad range of labour essentially simultaneously,
other innovative technologies often did face pushback from people whose jobs were threatened, and generally there have been significant social problems in the past when an economy moves away from people’s existing livelihoods (I’m thinking of e.g. coal miners in 1970s / 1980s Britain, though it’s not something I know a lot about),
even if the critique doesn’t stand up under from-first-principles scrutiny, lots of people think it’s a big deal, so if it’s a mistake it’s surely an understandable one from someone who weighs other opinions (too?) seriously.
I think it’s reasonable to argue that this worry is wrong, I just think it’s a pretty understandable opinion to hold and want to talk about, and I don’t feel like it’s compelling evidence that someone is deliberately trying to seek out arguments in order to advance a position.
See also “The costs of caution” which discuss AI upsides in a relatively thoughtful way.