Thatās not my read? It starts by establishing Edwards as a trusted expert who pays attention to serious risks to humanity, and then contrasts this with students who are āfocused on a purely hypothetical riskā. Except the areas Edwards is concerned about (āautonomous weapons that target and kill without human interventionā) are also āpurely hypotheticalā, as is anything else wiping out humanity.
I read it as an attempt to present the facts accurately but with a tone that is maybe 40% along the continuum from āunsupportiveā to āsupportiveā? Example word choices and phrasings that read as unsupportive to me: āenthralledā, emphasizing that the outcome is ātheoreticalā, the fixed-pie framing of āprioritize the fight against rogue AI over other threatsā, emphasizing Karnofskyās conflicts of interest in response to a blog post that pre-dates those conflicts, bringing up the Bostrom controversy that isnāt really relevant to the article, and ādorm-room musings accepted at face value in the forumsā. But it does end on a positive note, with Luby (the alternative expert) coming around, Edwards in between, and an official class on it at Stanford.
Overall, instead of thinking of the article as trying to be supportive or not, I think itās mostly trying to promote controversy?
Thatās not my read? It starts by establishing Edwards as a trusted expert who pays attention to serious risks to humanity, and then contrasts this with students who are āfocused on a purely hypothetical riskā. Except the areas Edwards is concerned about (āautonomous weapons that target and kill without human interventionā) are also āpurely hypotheticalā, as is anything else wiping out humanity.
I read it as an attempt to present the facts accurately but with a tone that is maybe 40% along the continuum from āunsupportiveā to āsupportiveā? Example word choices and phrasings that read as unsupportive to me: āenthralledā, emphasizing that the outcome is ātheoreticalā, the fixed-pie framing of āprioritize the fight against rogue AI over other threatsā, emphasizing Karnofskyās conflicts of interest in response to a blog post that pre-dates those conflicts, bringing up the Bostrom controversy that isnāt really relevant to the article, and ādorm-room musings accepted at face value in the forumsā. But it does end on a positive note, with Luby (the alternative expert) coming around, Edwards in between, and an official class on it at Stanford.
Overall, instead of thinking of the article as trying to be supportive or not, I think itās mostly trying to promote controversy?