Thanks Lixiang welcome to the forum! I understand your sentiment and thanks for expressing it here! I struggle with this as well, and on the surface it does seem like a strange thing for a large chunk of a community to devote their lives to. I felt much like you when I first heard about AI alignment, and I still have my doubts about how important an issue it s. I work in public health in low income countries and will probably devote the rest of my life to that, but the more I have looked into this AI alignment thing, the more I think it might be very important.
Even more than my personal relatively uninformed view, people far smarter and more informed than me think that it might be the most important issue humanity faces, and I respect their opinion. Good and smart people don’t devote their lives to a cause lightly.
I agree with you that there might be a bubble effect here that’s a good point. Most of us are in bubbles of different kinds, but my experience with effective altruists is that they are better than most at staying objective, open minded and non “bubbled”. People here might argue that the mainstream consumerist-capitalist -shorttermist”bubble” is part of the reason that not enough people worry about AI alignment.
All the best with finding more about AI alignment and making up your own mind!
Thanks Lixiang welcome to the forum! I understand your sentiment and thanks for expressing it here! I struggle with this as well, and on the surface it does seem like a strange thing for a large chunk of a community to devote their lives to. I felt much like you when I first heard about AI alignment, and I still have my doubts about how important an issue it s. I work in public health in low income countries and will probably devote the rest of my life to that, but the more I have looked into this AI alignment thing, the more I think it might be very important.
Even more than my personal relatively uninformed view, people far smarter and more informed than me think that it might be the most important issue humanity faces, and I respect their opinion. Good and smart people don’t devote their lives to a cause lightly.
I agree with you that there might be a bubble effect here that’s a good point. Most of us are in bubbles of different kinds, but my experience with effective altruists is that they are better than most at staying objective, open minded and non “bubbled”. People here might argue that the mainstream consumerist-capitalist -shorttermist”bubble” is part of the reason that not enough people worry about AI alignment.
All the best with finding more about AI alignment and making up your own mind!