I think if you work in AI Safety (or want to) it is very important to be extremely skeptical of your motivations for working in the space. This applies to being skepticism of interventions within AI Safety as well.
For example, EAs (like most people!) are motivated to do things they’re (1) good at (2) see as high status (i.e. people very quietly ask themselves ‘would someone who I perceive as high status approve of my belief or action?‘). Based on this, I am worried that (1) many EAs find protesting AI labs (and advocating for a Pause in general) cringy and/or awkward (2) Ignore the potential impact of organisations such as PauseAI.
We might all literally die soon because of misaligned AI, so what I’m recommending is that anyone seriously considering AI Safety as a career path spends a lot of time on the question of ‘what is really motivating me here?’
fwiw i think this works in both directions—people who are “action” focussed probably have a bias towards advocacy / protesting and underweight the usefulness of research.
I think if you work in AI Safety (or want to) it is very important to be extremely skeptical of your motivations for working in the space. This applies to being skepticism of interventions within AI Safety as well.
For example, EAs (like most people!) are motivated to do things they’re (1) good at (2) see as high status (i.e. people very quietly ask themselves ‘would someone who I perceive as high status approve of my belief or action?‘). Based on this, I am worried that (1) many EAs find protesting AI labs (and advocating for a Pause in general) cringy and/or awkward (2) Ignore the potential impact of organisations such as PauseAI.
We might all literally die soon because of misaligned AI, so what I’m recommending is that anyone seriously considering AI Safety as a career path spends a lot of time on the question of ‘what is really motivating me here?’
fwiw i think this works in both directions—people who are “action” focussed probably have a bias towards advocacy / protesting and underweight the usefulness of research.