I’m not saying this consideration is overriding, but one reason you might want moral agreement and not just empirical agreement is that people who agree with you empirically but not morally may be more interested in trading x-risk points for ways to make themselves more powerful.
I don’t think this worry is completely hypothetical, I think there’s a fairly compelling story where both DeepMind and OpenAI were started by people who agree with a number of premises in the AGI x-risk argument but not all of them.
Fortunately this hasn’t happened in bio (yet), at least to my knowledge.
I’m not saying this consideration is overriding, but one reason you might want moral agreement and not just empirical agreement is that people who agree with you empirically but not morally may be more interested in trading x-risk points for ways to make themselves more powerful.
I don’t think this worry is completely hypothetical, I think there’s a fairly compelling story where both DeepMind and OpenAI were started by people who agree with a number of premises in the AGI x-risk argument but not all of them.
Fortunately this hasn’t happened in bio (yet), at least to my knowledge.