Is this post conflating EAs or AI-safety researchers/advocates with longtermists? My impression is that actually rather few EAs are strong longtermists, and AI safety researchers/advocates maybe even less—they’re just united by their wish to avoid catastrophe, but differ in their understandings of the kind of catastrophe we should expect.
I think when AI safety was young and, er, weird, a lot of those talking about it were longtermists. That makes sense. But now it’s become a mainstream EA concern, and even a not-weird concern in society generally, so it’s unsurprising that it’s become less longtermist, from a sociological perspective.
I was intending to pick out a group of people who have for years identified as EAs and longtermists but have changed what they’ve worked on. I was thinking it was clear in talking about EAs deprioritising a thing that I meant the ones who prioritised that highly initially, but I see how that’s confusing—I’ll edit to clarify.
Right, what seemed to be missing to me was evidence that longtermists specifically had stopped working on extinction risk. But I see there are a good amount of posts others have linked in the comments that would count as evidence for this.
Is this post conflating EAs or AI-safety researchers/advocates with longtermists? My impression is that actually rather few EAs are strong longtermists, and AI safety researchers/advocates maybe even less—they’re just united by their wish to avoid catastrophe, but differ in their understandings of the kind of catastrophe we should expect.
I think when AI safety was young and, er, weird, a lot of those talking about it were longtermists. That makes sense. But now it’s become a mainstream EA concern, and even a not-weird concern in society generally, so it’s unsurprising that it’s become less longtermist, from a sociological perspective.
I was intending to pick out a group of people who have for years identified as EAs and longtermists but have changed what they’ve worked on. I was thinking it was clear in talking about EAs deprioritising a thing that I meant the ones who prioritised that highly initially, but I see how that’s confusing—I’ll edit to clarify.
Right, what seemed to be missing to me was evidence that longtermists specifically had stopped working on extinction risk. But I see there are a good amount of posts others have linked in the comments that would count as evidence for this.