I’ll share some low-confidence answers, plus some reasoning.
1. How likely do you think it is that the overall value of the future will be drastically less than it could have been, as a result of humanity not doing enough technical AI safety research?
My own answer: ~4% (note: this is my all-things-considered belief, not just my independent impression)
Predicted meansurvey answer: 14%
Predicted median survey answer: 6%
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Reasoning for my own answer:
I previously wrote “Conditional on TAI being developed and deployed someday (which rules out e.g. it being impossible or an x-catastrophe occurring before then), I fairly arbitrarily estimate a ~10% chance of that precipitating an existential catastrophe.”
(That phrasing implies that AI could only cause existential catastrophe once TAI is developed and deployed. I think that this is misleading, though perhaps technically true, in the sense that any AI that causes an x-catastrophe is thereby as transformative as the industrial revolution.)
And I also wrote: “I had a very vague sense that there was a 2% chance of x-catastrophe from anything other than TAI by 2055. This was based on basically nothing. Maybe I was just trying to be broadly consistent with my other views and with e.g. Ord’s views, but without checking in detail what consistency should entail.”
I can’t remember if this was conditioning on there being no TAI-induced x-catastrophe by then, but I think it implicitly was
I’ll defer to that past thinking of mine
This implies something very roughly like a 7% existential risk from AI specifically (accounting for the chance that it’s for some reason impossible to build TAI or that an x-catastrophe occurs before it’s built—which need not be before 2055)
My interpretation of this question captures only a subset of total x-risk from AI
“Drastically less” implies existential catastrophe, not just a more minor trajectory change, so the answer has to be equal to or less than total x-risk from AI
And I think existential catastrophe from AI could occur even if we put a huge civilizational effort into technical AI safety
E.g., we could have an aligned AI but then it’s misused (including in ways most humans are happy with but that are still morally horrible or squander our potential)
Before reading Note B, I interpreted the question as “How likely do you think it is that the overall value of the future will be drastically less than it could have been, with the key reason being that humanity didn’t do enough of the right kinds of technical AI safety research?” For that I said 2.5%.
Note B made me change my answer to 4%, and also makes me feel that the question is a bit weird.
If we had ten thousand well managed/coordinated top researchers collaborating on technical AI safety for 200 subjective years, it seems like they’d end up just also doing a lot of moral philosophy, political science, AI governance, etc. And if we say they have to stick to technical AI safety, they’ll just find ways to do the other things but make it look like technical AI safety. I think fairly early on they’ll notice that the biggest remaining issues aren’t really technical AI safety issues, and that it’d be crazy to just keep going further and further on the technical stuff.
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Reasoning for my predicted survey result:
My impression is that people at MIRI would probably have a mean x-risk from AI estimate of ~50%, while people at the other places you mentioned would have a mean estimate of ~10% and a median of 8%.
With (even) less confidence, I’d say people at MIRI would give a mean of 40% to question 1, and people elsewhere would give a mean of 7% and a median of 5%.
Maybe the survey selects from more pessimistic or more optimistic people than average. But I didn’t try to account for that.
I’m guessing MIRI people will be something like a quarter of your respondents.
This suggests the mean survey response would be ~17.5% (40*0.25 + 10*0.75)
It also suggests the median may be close to the median of the non-MIRI people, i.e. close to 5%.
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I notice that my all-things-considered belief is decently far from what I predict survey respondents will say, even though I expect survey respondents will know much more about AI x-risk and what technical AI safety research could achieve than I do. This feels a bit weird.
But I think it’s less that I’m very confident in my independent impressions / inside-views here, and more that I think the survey will overweight MIRI and (less importantly) that I also defer to people who don’t research long-term AI topics specifically. (To be clear, I don’t mean I trust MIRI’s judgement on this less than I trust each other group’s judgement, just that I give them less than a third as much weight as all of the other mentioned groups combined.)
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...I realised at this point I’d become nerd-sniped, and so forbade myself from doing question 2.
My impression is that people at MIRI would probably have a mean x-risk from AI estimate of ~50%, while people at the other places you mentioned would have a mean estimate of ~10% and a median of 8%.
Looking only at people who declared their affiliation: MIRI people’s mean probability for x-catastrophes from “AI systems not doing/optimizing what the people deploying them wanted/intended” was 80% (though I’m not sure this is what you mean by “x-risk from AI” here), with median 70%.
People who declared a non-MIRI affiliation had a mean Q2 probability of 27.8%, median 26%.
With (even) less confidence, I’d say people at MIRI would give a mean of 40% to question 1, and people elsewhere would give a mean of 7% and a median of 5%.
For Q1, MIRI-identified people gave mean 70% (and median 80%). Non-MIRI-identified people gave mean ~18.7%, median 10%.
I’m guessing MIRI people will be something like a quarter of your respondents.
5⁄27 of respondents who specified an affiliation said they work at MIRI (~19%). (By comparison, 17/~117 ~= 15% of recipients work at MIRI.)
I’ll share some low-confidence answers, plus some reasoning.
My own answer: ~4% (note: this is my all-things-considered belief, not just my independent impression)
Predicted mean survey answer: 14%
Predicted median survey answer: 6%
---
Reasoning for my own answer:
I previously wrote “Conditional on TAI being developed and deployed someday (which rules out e.g. it being impossible or an x-catastrophe occurring before then), I fairly arbitrarily estimate a ~10% chance of that precipitating an existential catastrophe.”
(That phrasing implies that AI could only cause existential catastrophe once TAI is developed and deployed. I think that this is misleading, though perhaps technically true, in the sense that any AI that causes an x-catastrophe is thereby as transformative as the industrial revolution.)
And I also wrote: “I had a very vague sense that there was a 2% chance of x-catastrophe from anything other than TAI by 2055. This was based on basically nothing. Maybe I was just trying to be broadly consistent with my other views and with e.g. Ord’s views, but without checking in detail what consistency should entail.”
I can’t remember if this was conditioning on there being no TAI-induced x-catastrophe by then, but I think it implicitly was
I’ll defer to that past thinking of mine
This implies something very roughly like a 7% existential risk from AI specifically (accounting for the chance that it’s for some reason impossible to build TAI or that an x-catastrophe occurs before it’s built—which need not be before 2055)
My interpretation of this question captures only a subset of total x-risk from AI
“Drastically less” implies existential catastrophe, not just a more minor trajectory change, so the answer has to be equal to or less than total x-risk from AI
And I think existential catastrophe from AI could occur even if we put a huge civilizational effort into technical AI safety
E.g., we could have an aligned AI but then it’s misused (including in ways most humans are happy with but that are still morally horrible or squander our potential)
Before reading Note B, I interpreted the question as “How likely do you think it is that the overall value of the future will be drastically less than it could have been, with the key reason being that humanity didn’t do enough of the right kinds of technical AI safety research?” For that I said 2.5%.
Note B made me change my answer to 4%, and also makes me feel that the question is a bit weird.
If we had ten thousand well managed/coordinated top researchers collaborating on technical AI safety for 200 subjective years, it seems like they’d end up just also doing a lot of moral philosophy, political science, AI governance, etc. And if we say they have to stick to technical AI safety, they’ll just find ways to do the other things but make it look like technical AI safety. I think fairly early on they’ll notice that the biggest remaining issues aren’t really technical AI safety issues, and that it’d be crazy to just keep going further and further on the technical stuff.
---
Reasoning for my predicted survey result:
My impression is that people at MIRI would probably have a mean x-risk from AI estimate of ~50%, while people at the other places you mentioned would have a mean estimate of ~10% and a median of 8%.
With (even) less confidence, I’d say people at MIRI would give a mean of 40% to question 1, and people elsewhere would give a mean of 7% and a median of 5%.
Maybe the survey selects from more pessimistic or more optimistic people than average. But I didn’t try to account for that.
I’m guessing MIRI people will be something like a quarter of your respondents.
This suggests the mean survey response would be ~17.5% (40*0.25 + 10*0.75)
It also suggests the median may be close to the median of the non-MIRI people, i.e. close to 5%.
---
I notice that my all-things-considered belief is decently far from what I predict survey respondents will say, even though I expect survey respondents will know much more about AI x-risk and what technical AI safety research could achieve than I do. This feels a bit weird.
But I think it’s less that I’m very confident in my independent impressions / inside-views here, and more that I think the survey will overweight MIRI and (less importantly) that I also defer to people who don’t research long-term AI topics specifically. (To be clear, I don’t mean I trust MIRI’s judgement on this less than I trust each other group’s judgement, just that I give them less than a third as much weight as all of the other mentioned groups combined.)
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...I realised at this point I’d become nerd-sniped, and so forbade myself from doing question 2.
Thanks for registering your predictions, Michael!
Results (hover to read):
Mean answer for Q1 was ~30.1%, median answer 20%.
Looking only at people who declared their affiliation: MIRI people’s mean probability for x-catastrophes from “AI systems not doing/optimizing what the people deploying them wanted/intended” was 80% (though I’m not sure this is what you mean by “x-risk from AI” here), with median 70%.
People who declared a non-MIRI affiliation had a mean Q2 probability of 27.8%, median 26%.
For Q1, MIRI-identified people gave mean 70% (and median 80%). Non-MIRI-identified people gave mean ~18.7%, median 10%.
5⁄27 of respondents who specified an affiliation said they work at MIRI (~19%). (By comparison, 17/~117 ~= 15% of recipients work at MIRI.)
Interesting, thanks!
(I’ve added some ruminations on my failings and confusions in a comment on your results post.)